Sharing The Promise Of Hope Through The Passion Of Baseball and Increasing Women’s Awareness On Good Governance In Tanzania.
By Majaliwa Mbogella - Chairperson & Director of Hope 4 Tanzania/ Chairperson of CCDO
The Children Care Development Organization (CCDO) and Hope 4 Tanzania with good faith has already made a strong partnership for the development of African orphans and poor marginalized girls coming from pure destitute families and those who are heading their families due to the death of their parents because of HIV and AIDS.
This is because child and youth prostitute numbers are on the rise every year. Victims are usually born into poverty, lack formal education or are cheated by employment agents who sell them to brothels. The typical daily life of a victim consists of mental abuse and rape. Over 1 million children are victims of sex tourism each year. They are heavily exposed to HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, while many women in our area have suffered from disease because they cannot read information most especially warnings, and some times women over dose or under dose themselves with drugs. Women or people who cannot read and write in most cases do not follow what they are told to do.
Allow us to thank the President & CEO of Hope 4 Tanzania Mr. Jonathan Bryan Cumpston (http://www.hope4tanzania.org),www.facebook.com/Hope4Tanzania, www.twitter.com/hope4tanzania (@Hope4Tanzania), the Chairman of the Coalition of Children Books Authors Dr. Michael Provitera (http://docprov.com/hacao.html) and the African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF) for their humanely heart for enlightening us. If you can not read and write, it brings poor communication and this means that people who cannot read and interpret records find problems when their messages are wrongly interpreted. All these partners have shown a positive way on how to deal with illiterate issues to our children and women living under injustice, poverty, underdevelopment, diseases and unemployment.
Jonathan Cumpston in this partnership said that” Sharing the passion of baseball through the promise of God’s hope is what Hope 4 Tanzania strives for in their work based on its mission to promote academic and athletic opportunities for the orphans and youth of Tanzania, using the sport of baseball as its foundation of hope. . God said in James 1:27, “Our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” Hope 4 Tanzania was founded on the principles of using the gifts that God has blessed each of us with here on earth to impact others. On April 15, 2014, Hope 4 Tanzania established itself as a private charity organization receiving its Article of Incorporation to commence as an official corporation. It was created by Jonathan B. Cumpston in Newport News, Virginia. His vision and dream was to use the talents he was blessed with, to impact the country of Tanzania. What better way to do that than to bring an unknown sport, to a country that is full of kids and young adults, begging for someone to care for them and a reason to hope…“For surely there’s a future promise and that promise of hope won’t be cut off.” – Proverbs 23:18”.
Hope 4 Tanzania will be serving the people of one of the most poverty stricken countries and highest population in the world for HIV and AIDS, Iringa, Tanzania. It is a Private Non-Profit Charitable Organization that will be working with orphans, kids, youth, and young adults in Tanzania, sharing the message of hope, grace, and love, using the sport of baseball. Tanzanian's are not forgotten and people care for them. The first trip for Hope 4 Tanzania will be in September of 2014. It will be a time to help with water conservation projects for developing clean water, educating the kids and youth in the primary and secondary schools, and getting to know kids and youth of Tanzania.
The way this whole vision is coming together has been a real blessing and great opportunity. Hope 4 Tanzania has already been working hard at raising funds, buying, and collecting baseball supplies. The first main focus will be to help with whatever the orphanage and schools need us to do, through the projects set up by teaching the kids and youth English, Math, and Computer Skills. After these projects and tasks are completed, Hope 4 Tanzania will use the afternoons and weekends to focus on teaching and coaching baseball and reach out to as many kids and youth as they can. They will also be building one or two crude baseball fields that can be left for the kids. It will be a way to plant the seed and lay a foundation of baseball in the country. That way, while the Hope 4 Tanzania staff is establishing itself between the United States and Tanzania, they will have something to leave there, as well as something to build on, and will be able to dive right into coaching and teaching on the next trip.
Hope 4 Tanzania reached out to the Country of Tanzania through the United States of American Embassy in Dar es Salaam, the largest city in Tanzania in May of 2014. It received an email back in response within a matter of days, from an orphanage located within the Region and Metropolis of Iringa that is geared towards helping the primary and secondary schools through education, books, and computer skills. They are called the Children Care Development Organization (CCDO). Now CCDO and Hope 4 Tanzania are working together to accomplish their overall goal of distributing books and educating the youth of Iringa through the use of computers, to further their academics and chances to move onto the Universities within Tanzania or possibly the United States of America.
CCDO has asked Hope 4 Tanzania to help them with their goals, as well as some of the water conservation projects within the communities and organization. They have offered us the chance to be able to share and teach baseball to the kids, youth, and young adult’s women within CCDO and the chance to build a baseball field or two on the eight acres of land that they own on the outside part of the town of Iringa. God is so good and doing amazing things with Hope 4 Tanzania. He has turned a small vision and dream from the CEO and founder, Jonathan B. Cumpston, into a reality and is using baseball and a passion to serve and help other people, in a unique and unusual way to develop into Hope 4 Tanzania.
As the said above, the CCDO believes that Hope 4 Tanzania will contribute to the transformation of our loved orphans mindsets from negative way of thinking to positively problems solving through tourism baseball games as you would like to know that, it is sometimes difficult to separate between the two aspects of child labour and economic hardship as many children have no other sources of income or care since our country is now faced with a rapid increase of orphaned children from the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Many orphaned children lack parental care and institutionalized children are also not taken care that well as do many children from single parent homes wher4e the parent has to work for long hours.
This is because, children have few options for employment due to lack of skills and training and as such, are highly vulnerable to working in jobs that involve hard labour. These hard labour positions include the agricultural sector, fishing, mining, timber production, and petty business such as selling fruits on the road side, as it was said by the UNICEF Report on violence against children in Tanzania. The Report highlights incidents of three types of child violence in the country (LHRC: 2011). The UNICEF Report reveals that, 3 children out of 10 females aged 13 to 24 have experienced sexual violence before reaching the age of 18. For male’s children of the same age group, 13.4% of them have experienced sexual violence before attaining 18 years. The report stated that the most frequent perpetrators of sexual violence against children are neigbours and strangers. This is because, children are at a high risk of physical abuse in Tanzania as the CCDO survey revealed that three quarters of both male and female children under 18 have experienced physical violence in terms of emotional violence, bullying, threats and sexual violence, whipping, corporal punishment, injuries caused by dangerous weapons, burning and confinement, while 60% of the perpetrators of violence are close relatives and family members.
Therefore, this joint partnership will contribute a lot for countering harmful practices that legitimate sexual and gender based violence in Tanzania against orphans and women that are associated from HIV/AIDS, stigmatization, discrimination suffering, and witchcraft killing and illiterate. Thus, the introduction of baseball games by the Hope 4 Tanzania in Tanzania will be the only weapons for raising orphans voices for the promotion of their livings standards as the United States of American President Barrack Obama said that “incorporating sport tourism into an area’s overall economic development strategy could assist in increasing the diversity of the local economy”. While the CCDO and Hope 4 Tanzania research indicates that scheduling community events and activities in conjunction with the sport event has the potential to increase the economic impact within the area.
The CCDO and Hope 4 Tanzania wants to address baseball game as a tourism campaigns for orphans and girls employment creation in their life future for attracting international tourism along Tanzania, Iringa as a case study. While the Hope 4 Tanzania indicated that children baseball games is a major tourist attraction for Iringa that attracts a large portion of visitors from outside the state who attend the baseball tournaments as well as other local tourism attractions. Since the expenditure of these sport tourists inject a significant amount of money into the local economy which are very essential to fulfill the promise of the 21st century approach education.