Well, I’m officially back in the world of blogging! I’ve once again returned to Tanzania, only this time to Zanzibar, for a 7 month internship (March 21st-October 21st, 2011) through the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), Youth Challenge International (YCI), and Family Planning Tanzania (UMATI). Although my placement is through all three of these organizations (take a look at the links of the right hand side if you’d like to learn a little more about each of them), while on the ground in Zanzibar I’ll be working directly with UMATI, their field staff and ongoing projects.
Who/What is UMATI?
UMATI is a non-profit NGO that provides sexual and reproductive health (SRH) education, services, and resources in 18 locations throughout Tanzania. UMATI offers a large variety of services including:
- Basic primary education for school dropouts due to pregnancy (2 sites)
- Vocational training programme in tailoring and Hotel Management (2 sites)
- SRH clinics (7 Sites)
- Library Services
- Income Generating Activities (IGAs)
- Life Planning Skills education
- Training in SRH
- Information centres for SRH related issues
- Drama, puppetry and recreational services
My Role
During my internship I will be working as a Health Promotion Officer with UMATI in Zanzibar and will spend the majority of my time on sexual and reproductive health projects focused towards at risk youth populations including commercial sex workers (CSW), men who have sex with men (MSM), and intravenous drug users (IDU). Within each of these areas I’ll be assisting UMATI in developing new projects, researching and identifying project needs and gaps, proposal writing, and monitoring and evaluation of current projects and programs.
I’m looking forward to the 7 months ahead of me. I know they will be filled with challenges, excitement, frustrations, wonderful experiences, professional development, great friends, successes and failures. I will try to update my blog regularly, although having kept a blog while in Tanzania before I know that it can be extremely time consuming and rather frustrating. Simply uploading a photo, which takes seconds at home, can take hours here. Be patient and stay tuned!
Sabrina xoxo
