Leaving for Tanzania

Sharon and Rick are spending two months in Tanzania, from January 16th until March 15th. We will try to post updates to this blog weekly.

We are volunteering with Minnesota International Health Volunteers (MIHV). The organization develops self-sustaining public health programs in developing countries, and in Minnesota. You can learn more about their work by visiting their website - www.mihv.org. We don't know what we will be doing yet, but check back on future postings.

In Tanzania they are developing a child survival project. One of the poorest countries in the world, more than half of Tanzania's population is children, and about 11.2% of them die before the age of five. And, more mothers die of pregnancy-related causes than the vast majority of other countries.

As the map shows, Tanzania is in east Africa, south of Kenya. The MIHV office is in the northern city of Karatu, about three degrees south of the equator, at an elevation of over 5,000 feet. It is near Ngorongoro Crater to the west and Arusha (a major city) to the east, and in the area of the Great Rift Valley. Tanzania is four times larger than Minnesota, with its own great lakes of Lake Victoria and Lake Tanganika. Famous sites include Mount Kilimanjaro, the Serengeti, and the previously mentioned Ngorongoro Crater, which is said to have the greatest concentration of mammals in all of Africa. Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam are also in Tanzania.