Dear Friends & Family,

This June, we will be heading to Arusha, Tanzania as part of a volunteer group to work on several projects for a non-profit organization called LOHADA (www.lohada.org). LOHADA focuses on helping disadvantaged and orphaned children throughout Tanzania by providing them with food, housing, and an education as well as running a health center and mobile clinic in some of its more remote areas. 

Our group will consist of twenty-four volunteers coming from Argentina, the US and Spain ranging in age from 8 to 67 years old. While we have several projects that we will be working on, our main goal will be to install a driveway and cement pathways throughout the 4 acre campus of LOHADA’s Camp Joshua school. This will finally allow the children to move freely from their dorms, classrooms and dining hall without traversing the grass and ground that typically swells with rainwater. The rainy season brings downpours that turn Camp Joshua into a muddy mess.

Lohada also runs a small farm in Arusha called Mt. Horeb whose aim is to grow food and vegetables to feed over 285+ children that LOHADA cares for. We are lucky to be joined by both a Professor of Horticulture and an agricultural engineer who will be assessing the farms productivity and providing expert advice for future crops.

In addition to mixing and pouring cement, our other projects will include:

• Painting the new boys dormitory that was built last year by volunteers
• Purchasing new beds and mattresses for this dorm
• Resurfacing the basketball court which has been completely unusable for years
• Teaching the children how to make recycled paper and create art
• Painting murals 
• Working with the teachers to create lesson plans focused on teaching the children entrepreneurial and business skills

We chose to focus our fundraising efforts on Lohada for several reasons:

• LOHADA is 100% Tanzania-run except for its board of directors which includes past volunteers from the last 23 years and two of the volunteers leading our efforts this June – https://lohada.org/board-of-directors/
• LOHADA has a US-based 501c3 umbrella organization (Kesho) that allows all donations to be tax deductible for US donors.
• LOHADA is a small volunteer-based organization which means that its administrative and overhead fees are less than 3% – allowing the majority of your donation to go directly to the children.
• LOHADA takes in the neediest children from across all of Tanzania 

We greatly appreciate all donations and no amount is too small. 

We believe that a person with an education not only improves his or her own life but also the lives of those around him. As Nelson Mandela once said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world”.For more on LOHADA, visit www.lohada.org