Dear Friends & Family,
What started at the beginning of last year as a group of friends and families wanting to teach our kids about hard work and empathy, has suddenly taken on a greater significance. This coming April, twenty-seven of us ranging from 11-75 years old will travel to Arusha, Tanzania to build a new dormitory, paint classrooms, and plant vegetable gardens for the 240+ disadvantaged children that LOHADA cares for and educates at Camp Joshua. The new dormitory will allow LOHADA to take in and educate more children, many of whom have lost one or both parents.
We've created this GoFundMe page to raise money to build “Neema’s House” - the new dormitory that will be dedicated to the memory of former Camp Joshua student, Neema Charles, a fifteen-year-old who passed away last December from osteosarcoma. The only way to overcome the misguided beliefs that kept Neema from conquering her cancer is better education. More on Neema’s story below.
We chose to focus our fundraising efforts on Lohada for several reasons:
- LOHADA is 100% Tanzania-run except for its board of directors which includes past volunteers from the last 22 years and two of the volunteers leading our efforts this April - https://lohada.org/board-of-directors/
- LOHADA has a US-based umbrella organization that allows all donations to be tax deductible for US donors.
- LOHADA is a small volunteer-based organization which means that its administrative and overhead fees are less than 3% - allowing the majority of your donation to go directly to the children.
- LOHADA is a Christian-based school that focuses on rescuing ALL children from the slums and rural villages and provides them with food, shelter, and education all the way through college. All children at Camp Joshua are free to practice the religion of their choice.
We greatly appreciate all donations and no amount is too small.
Neema’s Story
The picture above of Neema was taken last February 2022 by a volunteer in our group. Neema passed away at only 15 years old this past December from osteosarcoma (bone cancer).
Neema was from a small village in the Tabora region of Tanzania where witchcraft still exists, curses are still believed in, girls are married off young, and education is not a priority - especially for girls. It was no small miracle that her parents were convinced by Happiness Wambura, founder of LOHADA & Camp Joshua, to allow her to move to Arusha at age 9 to start school. Her first year at our LOHADA school was also her first year of school.
Last June, Neema found a small lump on her knee that continued to grow. Although volunteers quickly raised the money for her to start chemotherapy, the doctors felt the cancer was spreading too quickly and recommended they amputate her leg in order to save her. They needed her parent's permission which proved an impossible task.
Unfortunately, her father is one of the many villagers who still believe that this kind of sickness is a curse, and would not consent to the surgery. And so, Neema watched her tumor grow to the size of a small watermelon before finally passing in December. Sadly, Neema’s parents believed that sending her off to be educated was the reason she received this "curse' and the local witch doctor suggested she be left to die in the forest to remove the curse from the rest of the family. Luckily, social workers intervened but in the end, it was too late and Neema died alone in a small room in her village with no medicine to relieve her pain and no family to comfort her.
Christening the new dormitory “Neema’s House" can’t change what happened to Neema - a complex maze of cultural differences that precluded her from getting the treatments that might have saved her - but it will provide 100 new beds at Camp Joshua for the neediest of the needy while allowing Neema’s memory to live on.
We believe that a person with an education not only improves his or her own life but also the lives of those around him. As Nelson Mandela once said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world”.
Please donate today to help us honor Neema’s memory and continue to educate the children of Tanzania.
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