Denn Freunde sind füreinander da.

From Nancy Towo in june 2016

Among  the things that RAFIKI was successful is to take volunteers from Tanzania to Germany. By names its Mercy Lyimo and Nancy Towo, we are the first in this success to be able to stay in Germany for nine months .We arrived here in Germany December last year 2015. It was so cold than we ever experienced. Our mentor was there and helped us in everything that we needed. This has been such a great opportunity to be able to see other culture and life style than what we knew.

We arrived at our home which was the youth hostels  from BiBeKu in which each of us had a room. We called it international because we live with German youth and from other countries too. For afternoons we eat very good food from BiBeKu . For mornings and evenings we prepare on our own as we like. In other days we cook together with the youths in our hostel different types of food.

Kellinghusen it’s a village in Schleswig-Holstein. It has such a nice surrounding green all around. The people are nice as well. We live very near to the forest and a small lake which makes it even more beautiful. On top of that there is a river.

The works we do is according to our interests. I work for this RAFIKI home page translate it from English to Kiswahili language. My fellow volunteer works in the kindergarten which is in Kellinghusen. We also do some other projects together in which we cook Tanzanian food in different places and occations. Among them is the social house in Kellinghusen (more generation house). Whenever  there is a RAFIKI meeting we like to offer them Tanzanian food too. We also teach Kiswahili language in the University of Christian- Albert in Kiel. Apart from that we also visit schools with  African clubs and share somethings about Tanzania.

We had to start with learning the language. We have a very friendly teacher called Janna from Kellinghusen. We have German lessons  everyday for one hour from the first days. For me it was easier because I heard the German language before. For Mercy it was really hard because she didn’t heard so much of the language before. All in all we had fun exploring the language together.

More than working for RAFIKI we can also do many other things too. We got the chance to join the volleyball team in Wrist the village which is next to kellinghusen. We also get to watch female football tournaments. We got also chance to sightseeing in different places in Germany such as Hamburg. We made a trip to berlin with our mentor(Marcus Wack)and friend (Simon Dickmann). We went around the city and learned about recycling and plastic use reduction and also collecting some ideas for upcycling.