V.S.O. in Tanzania

I arrived in Tabora, Western Tanzania in 1966, four years after its independence, as a volunteer with Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) organisation. I was a 19 year old female graduate in Dairying from England. A couple of short courses and an orientation course in the country had given me a basic knowledge of Swahili and a rough outline of what to expect.

Describing the area:

Travelling on a three-day train journey inland to the west showed changing scenery from the lushness of the coast of Dar-es-Salaam through to dry and dusty Dodoma and on to Tabora where I was told I would see only flies and snakes. Here the line went North to Shinyanga and the diamond mines and on to Mwanza and Lake Victoria.

Tabora was a very small township then with straight roads and a large "boma" or fort left over from German occupation which housed the Government offices. The surrounding countryside, which is all savannahs, was sparsely populated. I was to work in this area which included the regions of Nzeza and Kahama; a total area approximately the size of England and Wales.

My task as a VSO worker:

I was to help the Nyamwezi Creameries Board, a dairy Co-operative, which had been set up to help local farmers sell their milk and to process it for the dry seasons into ghee (clarified butter), butter and cheese.

Transport was quite a problem; I had a motorbike for relatively short trips where I travelled sole and a land rover for longer accompanied safaris all taken on corrugated dirt roads. There were elephants in the area and lions could be heard at night.

The Creameries Board was housed in a small building in the town with heavily barred windows, a reminder that this had once been on a slave route. The actual slave routes could be detected by tall mango trees which had grown from the stones of fruit eaten along the way by slaves.

One of my jobs was to check on the outlying milk collecting centres. Some were very small huts where the workers might only need to be reminded to cover the gourds of milk from the flies - some workers I found asleep from smoking opium. In contrast, some larger centres were busy making ghee. Butter and cheese were more likely to be made in small rural processing plants with more emphasis on hygiene. The cheese was at an experimental stage with no refrigeration except in the town, therefore the produce had to keep well in the heat (which ghee does).

I also taught some animal husbandry to local farmers at a small training centre in Uranmbo, a place that had once been thriving under the British but which the bush was fast re-claiming. A lot of tobacco was grown in that area, a place I visited employed blind people to sniff and grade the tobacco which they were able to do probably better than sighted people.

The local farmers had been herding and milking their cattle for generations, the aim of VSO field workers and others was to bring teaching and information in the hope of improving efficiency whilst helping to reduce the hunger and poverty in the region.

By the end of my stay, a small dairy was designed and planned for the town. I then returned to the culture shock that was Britain.

I had set out to give, but Tanzania changed my life and gave me back far more.

BY: Pauline Lawrence

A brief history of VSO:

Voluntary Service Overseas was founded by the late Alec and Mora Dickson with backing from Inter Church Aid (now Christian Aid) and the late Bishop of Portsmouth, who sent a letter to the Sunday Times to support his vision.

On May 15 1958 the first VSO volunteers (eight 18-year-old men) left the UK to give a year's voluntary service in developing countries - Ghana, Nigeria, Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and Sarawak. Some of the first volunteers are still in touch with VSO, which still has thriving programmes in Ghana, Nigeria and Zambia. Since then over 30,000 volunteers have served in over 70 countries.

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