Tumaini Home
Tumaini Home is a Norwegian-Tanzanian organization that brings hope to children.
After having built and supported Marys House in Moshi, we were on the lookout for a new project - which Tumaini Home was a perfect fit for. Run by Ståle Anda from Nærbø in Rogaland, Norway, they provide a home, day care centre, education, medical support and job training at their location close to Arusha, Tanzania.
Tumaini Home is a small organization doing everything they can for the children. Children and teenagers live in their home. They all have different stories, but together they are one family.
Their home is built to taylor different forms of handicaps and illnesses, and is filled with people doing their best to offer assistance to those who need it.
In addition of being a children's home, they are a day care centre for children with mental handicaps, they support children living at home with education, they help children and teenagers seek medical help and they create places of employment.
Most of our children have different handicaps, mostly physical, some mental. Others have different illnesses or genetic deficiency, and some are completely healthy but have a difficult background.
We started working with Tumaini Home in 2022, and will have this as our main project going forward. Since summer of 2022 a total of NOK 70.000 (per 01.10.22) have been transferred to the project - and there’s more to come.
Tumaini Home in Mto wa Mbu, Arusha, Tanzania
Our first meeting with Ståle
JUNE 2022
We heard about Ståle and Tumaini Home through friends, and met him summer of 2022 for the first time. Ståle is 63 years old, and spends as much time as possible in Tanzania, but when in Norway, he works in psychiatry in Klepp and lives in a caravan on his daughter's farm outside Nærbø. All the money goes to running Tumaini Home. Never have we met someone as passionate and with such a big heart as Ståle.
Ståle first traveled with NORAD, the Norwegian agency for development cooperation, when he was 23. His dream was to work with tourism and having his own hotel, instead he has 15 employees, but lives without a salary and has zero equity. The hotel he dreamed of as a teenager may have turned out a little differently than he had imagined.
In Tanzania, he is the head of the orphanage, Tumaini Home, which is a home for orphans and the mentally disabled. He built this orphanage entirely himself, with the help of money from his own pocket and contributors in Norway.
- People my age have a house, a car and maybe a cottage. When I went to Tanzania in 2012, I sold my house. I used the money to build and run the orphanage and don't have a penny left. For managing the work at the orphanage, I get board and lodging.
At the age of 23, he finished his mechanical education and as the youngest man applied for the Peace Corps. He then ended up in Tanzania where, among other things, he worked farming in a camp for lepers. After two years, he returned home and trained as a teacher.
Then there were three new years in Tanzania. This time as an agricultural teacher for Maasai children in the city of Arusha.
In 1990, he moved back home, got married, had two daughters, took further education and became a teacher in special education. For eight years he worked as a teacher and farmer. Then he got divorced and the following year he went on a trip to Tanzania again. That trip would change his life and that of many other people.
On one of the excursions he saw a girl dragging herself up to her elbows in cow dung. The girl was paralyzed from the waist down and had no other way of getting around.
Once back home in Norway, Ståle agreed with her students at Orstad school to collect money for a wheelchair and surgery for her. They also had a straw hut built for her and financed people to look after her. This was the start of the orphanage work, which is called Tumaini Home and means “home of hope”.
The projects runs on NOK 800.000,-, which of half comes from regular donations from friends and family in Norway, the rest is either covered from events - or from Ståles own pocket.
Ståle and his project meets all of our criteria which we’ve had for our initial plan; building a second “Marys House”. We will therefore continue supporting Tumaini Home as our main project going forward.
Our first donation to Tumaini Home
AUGUST 2022 - THE AFTERMATH OF COVID
For running Tumaini Home Ståle has been reliant on donations. During Covid it has not been possible to host the usual events in Norway, which has put Tumaini Home in a difficult position. To help out in this situation, we’ve done our first donation of NOK 50.000,-. They money comes from the support we got while me, Pia and Arnfinn drove Mongol Rally in 2019.
This is the first donation, but not the last. We have a goal of supporting Ståle and Tumaini Home in the time to come, and plan to come visit the project in 2023.