Finally we had our first day at the orphanage! Our taxi driver Valence picked us up at the hotel and we made our way through the quite busy streets of Arusha and the last bit through a muddy road in the slums. Any other 4x4 driver in the UAE would have given up in these roads I guess, but it’s amazing what a little old normal car can manage! Although obviously living in bitter poverty, you don’t see any bitter faces, this is simply striking and tells you a lot about life, appreciation and relativity of life….

When we arrived, Alice and Julius, the founders of the orphanage, welcomed us warmly and told us a thousand times how grateful they are that we are here and what the management team at Sheraton made possible. Sitting in their ‘living room’, a rough concrete wall, mud floors with one carpet and two sofas, we discussed our procedures for the next days, planned the expenses for the veranda and how to get started this week. 

living room

We wondered how to find out the size of the children’s feet. And here we go with the result:

all feet drawn on paper

Talking about their background a bit, Alice told us that she grew up with a mother that was an volunteer herself, teaching in schools. Alice got involved quite heavily and made this volunteer teaching her mission. Soon she found out that many kids have absolutely nothing for themselves, many of their fathers got re-married after their moms died and they were not accepted in the new family anymore, ending up being used for the household chores and child care. This leaves them without education, quite a lack of affection and often beaten by older members of the family. This made Alice decide to set up an orphanage by herself, enabling those kids access to education and at least for a few hours a day – affection and love. There are some children in the orphanage with no parents, having been infected by HIV themselves and lost their parents to this disease.

In 2003, she and her husband started with a small basic classroom, as in the picture below.

initial classroom

There was no food, there was no supplies, nothing. Volunteers started to come along and with this, publicity started to rise. With the foundation of the ‘Glorious Orphanage’ charity organization, properly registered with the government, the fundraising could start and the orphanage as it is today was built in 2007, using the funds for building the new class rooms, medicine supply, building a kitchen, paying the food for all kids and the salaries of the teachers. In the beginning, many children were too sick to go to school, they came with bruises and other injuries and suffering from malnutrition. Alice herself walked to their homes and confronted the family threatening with police until the bruises stopped. Today, the kids have their daily meal at the orphanage, for many of them the only one for the day. What started with porridge is now featuring a daily changing meal of beans/corn, other vegetables and fruits like potatoes and bananas and once a week rice with meat. This is why we decided to buy and cook for them a fully-fledged lunch with lots of meat, rice, veggies, fruits etc. on our last day. We are looking forward to this! The whole meal for around 90 people costs 200 USD, this is nothing compared to our country, so again this gives you some different thoughts about how little really makes a difference over here.

Another impressive story is about the ten widows around the orphanage which had no other choice then to beg for food and money for their rent. Glorious started to buy food and supplies from them, enabling them to earn some money on the side. Glorious is helping them to set up a small business, buying them a machine to produce slippers, installing it in one of the new office rooms of the orphanage. Once the business is up and running, the widows hopefully can afford to rent another shop in town for themselves. This explains why they so desperately pledged for electric wiring in the new office rooms. We did not plan this for this trip, but who knows, with some more fundraising in the UAE, we might make this possible as well…

Every month, Glorious Orphanage Cooperation sends money for the food and salaries. Food only for one month is around 2 million Tanzanian Shillings, translating into 1300 USD. A Gucci bag starts at around 2000 USD if it’s a small one – think!

Funds for the food, salaries, uniforms and school supplies are covered from the annual kids' sponsorship fees. Funds for projects such as building classrooms, playground, water well etc. are raised by the Glorious Orphanage Cooperation team in the US, Canada, Italy and the UAE through private donations or corporate donations such as ours. When we entered the first class room, the kids very overly excited, greeting properly ‘good morning teacher!’ (since every volunteer, or white person is seen as a teacher by them) and gave us their biggest smile – forget about shyness!

one of the four new classrooms

In school, which consist of four newly built class rooms (funded by various donors including an anonymous donor from the UAE as we learnt later), they learn English, Swahili, Mathematics as the main subjects and a little bit of Science and Geography. They have five full-time teachers but a lot of the contribution is done by the Western volunteers that come and go at the orphanage.

Once school was finished and the kids had a break to wait for the lunch, we finally had a chance to properly meet them. This was quite an overwhelming experience, having them running all over the dusty school yard, playing soccer or just crawling up our laps wanting to be held and cuddled. We started to follow their orders of ‘teachers push me’ on the metal swing which was big hit, together with playing the ‘flying planes’ in our arms making them dizzy and laughing.  At one point, we found ourselves painting stars, hearts, numbers and letters in the sand with our bare hands, allowing them to show off their skills. Wherever we looked, they tried to impress us with standing on their hands, shooting the football up the roof, climbing on the building and jumping from it or simply attacking us from the back with a sudden cuddle.

Yves, Alice, Martina, Zoe, Julius

they are just happy!

Yves with one of the cutest kids ever!

I had two little girls playing with my hair while I was cuddling another one, when I went inside to have a sip of water I found a professional dread lock standing from my head! They are little professionals over there! Zoe on the other hand was sitting with one of them on her lap in the class room, eagerly learning how to copy the numbers she was writing for them! Yves, as the only male and white ‘teacher’ found himself as a father figure for 81 kids, resolving conflicts and fights, wiping tears and fixing bruises and got pulled from one corner to the other to play the school yard police. We had so much fun!

zoe playing with the kids

love them!

zoe with the kids

swinging with our little friends

On the way home, after organizing some millions of Tanzanian Shillings for downpayments, we had another goody - RAIN!!!!!

We are excited about what tomorrow will bring - balloons are apparently in high demand with the kids, we will also bring the blankets which finally arrived this afternoon at the airline's office and so we'll keep you posted on another day in amazing Tanzania. 

Kilimanjaro Airport

Welcome to Arusha!

After a delayed night flight, a full plane, a missed connection flight and three luggage items less, we finally reached Kilimanjaro Airport and Arusha! Leaving the hassles of the trip aside, it is totally worth it! The first impressions of Tanzania are overwhelming, a vivid world of exciting colors, relaxed and wonderfully friendly people, a fresh smell in the air and all kinds of areas we've driven through on our way to the hotel.


The 'Charity Hotel' is a very positive surprise - idyllic, spacious and so comfortable! Sitting in the garden and relaxing for a while, we are planning the week ahead, calculating our expenses and getting very excited about meeting the kids tomorrow!

hotel garden

Yves, Martina and Zoe

"7 Days" newspaper, 17 February 2012

Thank you "7 Days" newspaper for the article today!

We are all excited by now, all items are purchased and packed and we also received 85 baseball caps from Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority, which kindly donated those for our cause. Thanks to ADTA!

On Saturday morning we will have our last meeting with the UAE Representative of Glorious Orphanage, Ms Lujan Murad, who will give us the necessary contacts on site. In case of donations, please email me and I'll get you in touch with her.

We will leave from Dubai on Sunday early morning with Kenya Airways, so the next update will already be sent from Arusha, Tanzania!

Keeping you posted, as always.

Group picture of the HOD team

Our HOD's (Head of Department) with the purchases 

With only three more days to go, we are getting ready for packing the items. Today, we got the most of the management team together for a picture with the purchases, everyone visibly excited about our "mission"!

From left to right:
Chandran Pillai, Director of Engineering
Zoe Cooper, Director of Housekeeping (joining the trip)
Liliane Boo, Executive Administrative Assistant
Mr. Karunakaran, Director of Supply Chain
Thomas van Opstal, General Manager
Aklilu Admekom, Training Manager
Rainer Wiegand, Director Operational Innovation
Hussein Tailun, Deputy Director Front Office
Christophe Gavois, Executive Chef
Otto Widl, F&B Manager
Mohamed Mahdi, Director Security
Yves Tarabout, Deputy General Manager (joining the trip)
Mahmoud Abulwafa, Director Human Resources
Ahmed Hafez, Director Revenue
Mai Nassar, Director Sales & Marketing
Lourdes Olalia, Director IT

Of course, they would all love to come along and join this wonderful experience but the hotel needs to be managed in the meantime! We'll keep them as much updated as you, and THANKS again to the whole team for making this possible with the generous email-donations!

Khaleej Times, Saturday 11 Februrary 2012

Thank you Khaleej Times!

The Saturday edition of Khaleej Times featured our project on a full page! We hope to raise as much awareness as possible, if you would like to donate anything to the Orphanage, please get in touch with us, we will connect you with the UAE representative, just drop us an email to martina.venus@sheraton.com. Thanks!

Great news!

Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority kindly sponsors branded Abu Dhabi caps for the children of Glorious Orphanage! This will make a great souvenir for the kids to remember Abu Dhabi.

Also, we went shopping today and got a "few" items for the children. This will have to be distributed to the luggage of the three of us, what seems to be a little bit of a challenge:

the items to carry so far

We got 85 warm blankets for them (Otto, me, Zoe and Yves shopping):

Otto, me and Zoe shopping (Yves taking the picture)

As well as many many socks, underwear, crayons, balloons, stickers, painting books and vitamin candies:

necessities for the children

All other items, such as the running shoes, toys, other clothes, blackboards AND a new veranda for the class rooms will be bought once we are in Arusha.


We now dearly hope that we firstly can fit it all into our luggage allowance, and secondly will be able to carry it to the orphanage on site!

Shoes and other issues....


We are all set now, Sunshine Travel & Tours kindly agreed to sponsor the whole flights for the trip, directly to Kilimanjaro Airport, thanks a lot!

In the meantime, our Director of Housekeeping also decided to join us at her own costs which we find amazing. But we cannot cover more than two persons from the charity fund in order to keep the travel costs down. Thanks Zoe!

Our whole management team actually would love to come along, they are just as excited as we are, but somebody has to stay here and work... ;-) We will keep them updated with the live blog though and offer follow up trips lateron.

We had a meeting with the UAE Representative of "Glorious Orphanage", Ms Lujan, to discuss what we will buy here and what we'll purchase on site. The biggest wish of the 81 children are new running shoes. Every child only possesses one pair of shoes and they are guarded like a treasure.

When asking for the individual sizes we learnt that they do not really know shoe sizes. So the "Orphanage Mother" will put the little feet of each single kid on a white sheet of paper and make a drawing of the silhouette. Like this, we can go with our 81 papers to Arusha and buy those shoes! :-)

The countdown is on - from today it is exactly two weeks to go and the excitement rises by the minute!