Volunteering Experiences 

Throughout the year our volunteers are busy here in the UK helping to fundraise and run our UK organisation. We are completely led by volunteers so there is huge potential to learn new skills and take on responsibility for helping to develop our relatively new organisation. If you want to learn about running a charity, this is the way to do it!

During the summer some of our volunteers also choose to visit Tanzania, to further our aims and help evaluate our work or conduct further research. We always select volunteers from our pool of UK volunteers first and foremost, and would normally only look for other volunteers if we needed someone with a particular skill set, or if we needed someone to volunteer during the academic year when our student volunteers are based in the UK.

As part of our objective to encourage more people to volunteer their skills and time for the benefit of others, we are making a collection of stories from volunteers who have helped WiT both in the UK and Tanzania, to show the rewards of volunteering.

We are also conducting research this summer to evaluate the benefit that our volunteers have to the people we are working with, and we hope to publish stories of their experiences of us here too.

Kathryn's Story

Kathryn Mason visited Tanzania in the Summer of 2007 and helped teach French to students at Meserani Education Centre. The purpose of these workshops was to help people gain access to the tourist industry, as people are more employable if the speak multiple European languages. Her story follows:

"For me, going to Tanzania was a chance to experience something that I had never done before. To have the opportunity to live in a country so different from my own and to make friends with people from a completely different background and culture was fascinating. I feel that I learnt so much about Tanzania from being there that I could never have read about in a book. It was also a wonderful feeling knowing that I had come to do something useful and to fit into local community life.

The people at the centre so deeply appreciate the effort put in by the volunteers and are so welcoming. I had one student who cycled miles just to come to my classes which made me realise just how important the centre is to those who use it. I also had the wonderful experience of meeting Eli Pokea and having the chance to work with the incredibly cute kids in his growing school. All these experiences reminded me of just how important education is and how much we take it for granted in England.

And it’s not all work. The people I met were fantastic, both the other English volunteers and the Tanzanian friends we made were great fun. Be it a night in playing Articulate or a night out in Arusha clubbing African style the whole experience was amazing. As part of the trip I also took the chance to climb Mount Kilimanjaro which was the best thing I have ever done. The view from the top as the dawn rises is something that can’t be matched.

One of the best things about it was volunteering with a small scale, very personal, caring organisation full of people passionate about what they’re doing. Each project was self led and so I got the chance to help decide how much money I would need to fundraise, when and how to do it and crucially, how it got spent during my time out there. Being able to see exactly where the money goes is one of the best things about Working in Tandem because you can be confident that every penny is going to count"