Georgia Gray, a student at Oxford University contacted Asante Mariamu last January, offering to help our organization. We were fortunate that this compassionate and energetic young woman volunteered to travel to Tanzania with Doug this summer. Here is her story.
About a month ago I travelled to Tanzania, under the guise of gathering information for my final year university dissertation. I’d read all the papers recommended by my supervisors, scoured the library and emptied online journals of any relevant papers. Ask me the difference between ocular and oculocutaneous albinism and I’d be able to reel off the facts in the order they were discovered. Tell me to draw a genetic diagram explaining albinism inheritance and I could do it in a heartbeat. Colour coded. Tell me that the trip I was set to embark on made this information completely redundant and I’d probably have a hard time believing you.
We’ve all read the stories, and heard the news reports detailing the absolutely horrific crimes going on in Tanzania today. And as a fledgling student, eager and willing to solve the problems of the world through my one paper, I couldn’t be more excited to tackle the problem head on. Surely, I thought, this wasn’t that complicated.
I got my first taste of reality no more than twelve hours into the trip. Speaking to Reverend Bartholomew of Bishop Mpango School, I asked him about any stories of attacks within the region. Had any albinos he knew been attacked? He looked at me like I was from another planet, before affirming the question, that yes of course he knew of attacks. Yes the children in his school had been attacked. Yes the people we were to meet the next day had been threatened countless times, were scared to leave their own home, had hidden themselves or their family for many years. ‘Look at this woman,’ he said to us just the morning after. ‘This woman had one of her children taken and murdered, with the attackers threatening the life of her two non-albino children in exchange for her albino child.’ She had had to make a decision so disgustingly horrifying, so completely against every primal extinct we have; in order to save her other two children.
I couldn’t even begin to comprehend how this woman was still here, still in fine mental health, with another child breastfeeding quietly at her chest. But I was soon to learn that such stories were commonplace in these areas, that everyone, be it mother, father, brother, sister or neighbour had another horrific tale to divulge. It was routine, and for every mother who had had her child taken, there was a father who could not even mourn for his deceased child because of the all too common act of grave-robbing albino graves.
The people we met out there, whether they were church leaders, or fellow non-profit organisations were all so startlingly brave in the face of such limited community support. They were going into extremely rural areas and combating an ingrained social issue with extremely limited financial or physical support. It was often a thankless task: the government had little involvement, and the people we were helping were at direct threat from the community they lived within. Thankfully, we worked with people on the ground who saw it as their utmost duty to help the most vulnerable members of their society.
Georgia has more to say about her trip, and the bravery she encountered. Her next post will introduce one of our heroes, Sister Maria Helena.
