Welcome to Tanzania

The Girls Education Mission is designed to allow at-risk girls to stay in school through their own effort rather than through charity alone. It also is intended to provide a direct and simple method for people who wish to help but want to know exactly where their money goes. The new program is starting in Tanzania but is designed to be easily replicated as opportunities and needs arise in other locations.

The Girls Education Mission was started by author Martha Boone Mattia, an American writer of oral histories, and Glory Baltazari, a recent law school graduate in Tanzania.

"I traveled to Tanzania in 2007 to interview teenage girls for an upcoming nonfiction book when one of the girls expressed her greatest wish: to go to school. Her greatest fear: being forced into prostitution in order to survive. The beautiful but sad-eyed sixteen-year-old worked as a non-paid domestic in a tiny house in the middle of a banana grove, far away from her family. Her only compensation was food and shelter, but school was out of the question because Tanzania is such a poor country that it cannot offer free high school. Each day, she said, the hours dragged until her girlfriends returned from school, fresh with stories and knowledge. Sometimes the other girls lent her their books, which shetreasured even as she envied those to whom they belonged. I will always be haunted by that girl."

	A poster on the newspaper-covered mud wall of one of the girls. The poster is in Swahili and loosley translates to, "if you think you have it bad, don't complain but be thankful for what you have - others have it worse than you."