Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Kivulini Women's Center


 
We started this morning with a visit to Kivulini.  It is a Women's center here in town.  The center is in a small tin-roofed building on the side of a hill.  They had some plastic tables set up for us behind the center in a hut.  We were expecting to meet with some of their clients about drafting wills.  There was a slight miscommunication between the coordinating attorney and the center apparently because instead, they had assembled around 20 women who are the leaders of local NGO's.  They came from all around the local area to hear what we could teach them about drafting wills.

We ended up having a great 2 hour interactive session with these women.  It is still amazing to me how little these women know about the rights we take for granted.  They were all taking copious notes about every detail of the presentation so that they could spread out into their individual groups and pass this information along to women in need in their respective areas of service.  They continued to thank us for our time and the information, and the women were so excited, several of them asked us if we could come back tomorrow to draft wills for some of their clients.  Before we even got out of the center, a couple of them could be heard in their offices, already calling their clients telling them to come in tomorrow for our help.


One of the ladies thanking us after our meeting



After the meeting at Kivulini, we were honored to have been invited to meet Justice Sumari who is the judge in charge of the High Court of Tanzania in the Mwanza district.  She met with us for almost an hour in her chambers, and invited a couple of other magistrates and judges to sit in on the session.  She was very interested in our mission here.  It was a great visit.
The old high court building


We are all getting a bit on the tired side.  We have been pretty busy since we arrived.  Hopefully soon, we will have a little time to unplug, but I will say the meetings we've had have exceeded any expectations i had for the trip and we are really just getting started with our mission here so life is good :-)

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