Our Global Outreach Tanzania (GOT) staff has been busy since our last newsletter, installing computers and Windows to Knowledge (W2K) learning platforms. We are now supporting schools in five regions (Iringa, Dodoma, Arusha, Kilimanjaro, and Kagera) and expanding our organization to handle this growth. This newsletter will give you a few tidbits of recent occurrences in country, so you know we are still busy and dependent on you to help us help Tanzanian children.

                                      Tanzania Leadership and Covid

There has been a lot of interest in how Tanzania is weathering the corona virus. For a long time, it was depressing to those of us on the side of science, as presiding Magafuli first denied the existence of the virus, then forbade imported masks, and finally refused vaccines from all international organizations. But in March, he passed away from heart complications that rumors attributed to his contracting the virus himself. Vice President Samia Suluhu Hassan, Tanzania’s first woman president, has taken a much different approach and vaccinations have begun. 

Unfortunately, much time was lost, and the country is now experiencing severe outbreaks, primarily in Dar es Salaam, and the Arusha/Moshi communities. The Kilimanjaro Regional Commissioner, shown in our latest newsletter visiting GOT installations in Moshi, was among those who succumbed to the disease.

                A Sad Farewell to a Dear Friend

Another victim of the pandemic hit too close to home. Francis Mwachombe, who served as GOT Executive Director between 2012  and 2016, passed away on August 18. Francis’s relationship with GOT goes back to the first group of schools we added from the original computer literacy program in Pommerin. As Head of School at Lugalo, he was an early proponent of the need for Tanzanian children to have computer literacy. As president of the Iringa Region association of secondary school Heads of School, he helped give credibility to our efforts to grow the programs in the earliest days. He was always ready to lead; and he worked tirelessly with Dr. Jan Pullen, head of Saint Stephen’s Episcopal School in Bradenton, Florida, to do videoconferences between their students, years before more advanced countries began using technology for this activity. Following his retirement from GOT, he had been a board member and part of the Executive Committee, tirelessly giving his experience in all elements of education.

I will sorely miss Francis. He is an essential page in GOT’s history, and a finer gentleman never existed.

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