Leaving with a Bang

Our last week in Dar felt a bit like an attempt to test the limits of time and space. Saying good-bye to everyone and visiting all of our favourite places was going to be busy enough. And then for I needed to make arrangement for my return in January. We crammed it all in right up to the final hours, where we celebrating with my Executive Director at her kitchen party.

What's a kitchen party? Its a bridal-shower like you've never seen it before. No games and a few presents in someone's living-room, this is an event almost as big as the wedding itself, involving all of the women in the bride's life. I went to a couple kitchen parties in Zambia but this was my first Tanzanian occasion and it was a lot fancier than I've previously seen. Everyone who attends contributes to support the expenses of the party and to buy the bride gifts.

The entire party was hosted by a matron who lead the party in welcoming the bride to the world of marriage and gave her advice on how to be a good wife. This, of course, was mixed in with a lot of dancing!

In the chaos of organizing ourselves to go home, it was a really special way to spend our last night in Tanzania. Its hard to believe that this six months is coming to an end. Even though I'm coming back, it will be different. I'll miss the great group that we had. Nikupenda sana!

I Think This is the Start of a Beautiful Friendship

I have been struggling about how to write the post for the end of my stay in Dar es Salaam. But it looks like I've managed to escape this task because I'M COMING BACK IN JANUARY!

Last minute, I've managed to pull together more work for another 3 months, so I will be swinging through London and Canada before heading back to Tanzania in January.

The next few months going to be a bit different because I will be coming back on my own but I'm really excited to be able to continue to working with Equality for Growth. Its going to be an busy three months as we work to get the new strategic plan under way.

So I now have a weekend of “see you later,” instead of “good-bye” though I will still be saying tearful good-byes (and this is a literal prediction) to my fellow interns. Next posting will be from the Northern Hemisphere!

Legally Empowered

There is a quote on the bulletin board in our office which says “In the absence of good structures, even good people behave badly.” This quote rings very true in a lot of the work that we do, but there is another piece to this equation that has also become very clear to me- Good structures are only helpful when people are aware of them and know how to navigate them.

This is exactly the challenge women market trader's face in their lives. Bureaucracy is confusing to most of us, but with low levels of education, no access to information and no one to guide you through the process, its a nightmare. Imagine if you had no idea how to get a piece of ID, why you needed a marriage certificate or what a contract was, and nobody else around you had any clue either. This lack of legal knowledge leaves women vulnerable to everything from fake marriages and abuse to property grabbing and business scams.

Which is why Equality for Growth is launching a legal aid program for market women. The project official launched this fall at a big opening ceremony. Over the next year, 25 women and men who work in and around the markets will attend training sessions to become paralegals. These paralegals will be able to help women with basic legal advice, mediate disputes and guide them through the legal system.

What is incredible is that these women and men are all volunteers. There is no funding to pay paralegals for their work and they offer their services for free. Most of them will be juggling their own business at the same time. For most people who work a full-time job, volunteering one afternoon a week can be a struggle. These people will likely see 3-5 clients a week. Its an impressive commitment.

At the first training session, the paralegals to-be biggest worry was that they wouldn't be able to understand enough of law and legal practice to offer advice. This has rapidly changed. The second training session ended just last week and the groups was confident enough to tell the trainers they wanted the last few hours of the training so they could plan as a group to set up their work in the markets. In the course of a couple months they've gone from hesitant to full-throttle.

Its a neat aspect of the project, that as much as the women will benefit from the legal aid, those trained also really benefit from the sense of confidence and community they get from being part of the paralegal team. I think it will be exciting to see, not just the help the new paralegals will provide but also how this experience will also ripple through their own lives and what else it might empower them to do.