Africa

Click here to all my Africa photos and slideshow.

Holy Cornopolis! I feel like I have done more in two weeks then I have in two years. I just spent two weeks in Tanzania Africa with a San Diego based organization called the FFCC. This trip definitely did not have long walks on the beach, g-strings, relaxing hammocks, or Dog the Bounty Hunter, but it was forever changing on the way I think and how I will do things.

I can't even begin to tell you how many people we helped or how many lives we changed. We had many missions that occupied this entire trip. One of our objectives was to lay the foundation for a playground that was a part of the children's center that the FFCC built four years ago. The children's center provides food, water, school uniforms, education, and a place off the sandy streets for thousands of homeless children. And when I say thousands, I mean thousands due to the lack of contraception. Between 800 - 1000 children ages 4-17 are fed rice everyday. The FFCC provides the facility and food if the government provides the school uniforms (which is their tuition) and teachers. Each child must attend school in the mornings in order for them to receive food in the afternoon.

We also installed water filters that will kill ANY water-borne bacteria and lasts up to 150 years. Different families around Tanzania received these small filters that will put an end to their cholera, typhoid, diarrhea, fever, and even death. Clean drinking water is nowhere to be found in Tanzania unless you are privileged enough to buy it in a bottle. This country is truly desperate for a clean glass of water.

I also had the extreme and rare chance to visit one of the world's last tribes and the founding land where modern humans first emerged over two million years ago. After a four-hour, ditch ridden ride in the back of a truck, we finally arrived to the most isolate place in Africa. "The land of the Hadzabe tribe." There they were, carrying their bows and arrows, the Hadzabe tribe waited for our arrival. Unfortunately, our time with the Hadzabe tribe was spent very briefly. We had two goats slaughtered to feed them and spoke with them about building a medical dispensary on their land. With no medicines existing in the area and once numbering over 10,000 members, the Hadza people are slowing dying off into the low hundreds. They are also some of the last hunter-gatherers on the African continent and have even recently stopped wearing animal skins as their form of clothing.

Have you ever been to a leper colony where people are completely deformed and blind?
Have you ever hugged and shook hands with a leper/person that just wants to be touched and looked at like a human being?
Have you ever been to a HIV orphanage where children have no parents and will not live past their teens? These are just a few other incredible places that I had the rare privileged to see, and the experiences that I shared with these people will always stay with me.

To top this mission trip off, we concluded with a two-day safari to the famous Ngorongoro Crater and Lake Manyara. Ngorongoro Crater is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been to. It was like a natural zoo that kept all the wildlife into a trapped ecosystem. Let me just say this place is pretty "majestic."