Social Work’s Tuchman Travels to Tanzania to Work Alongside Silver School Students
By Barbara Jester
A project involving the building of a rescue center for homeless girls in Tanzania, which has been developed by Silver School of Social Work undergrad Christopher Gates, served as the impetus for social work professor Ellen Tuchman’s visit to that country this summer. She traveled there with the dual purpose of exploring the possibility of setting up a study abroad program there for social work students and creating an educational component for a group of Silver School undergrads who were spending the summer working at the site.
The rescue center, built with the help of contributions from a private foundation named after Gates’ grandmother, the Janada L. Bachelor Foundation for Children (JBFC), an N.G.O. in Tanzania, houses abandoned and abused girls, ages 5 to 16, many of whom have been orphaned after their parents have died of AIDS. The 20 acres of property owned by the JBFC also includes a group home, with a full-time matron and assistant, and a farm where livestock, fruit, and vegetables are raised. The girls attend the village school with other local children and learn to care for and manage the livestock and farm. Eventually JBFC will expand to accommodate 150 girls, another facility will be built for 150 boys, and there will be a secondary school and a trade-training school.
Tuchman learned about the project from Gates when he was enrolled in her “Social Work Research Methods” class last spring. When he asked her to visit the center and to mentor some of his fellow students who would spend part of the summer volunteering there, she readily agreed. Along with that work, Tuchman spent her time in Tanzania reaching out to a range of social service programs, including the Hindu Union Hospital, which runs an HIV/AIDS care and prevention program, the Institute of Social Work in Dar Es Salaam, where she met faculty and staff, and the Tanzania Gender Networking Program, an N.G.O. that promotes gender equality and the advancement of women in Tanzania society.
“Soaring levels of absolute poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy, infant mortality, AIDS, orphans, and vulnerable children , and the subordinate position of women in the economic, social, and political spheres prevail in Tanzania,” Tuchman said. “In Tanzania, societal recognition of the value of professional training in social work is not wide and the small numbers of social workers are scattered and under-resourced, more often focused on safety-net tasks than wider development.”
At the JBFC, Tuchman and the students introduced the orphan girls, who speak Swahili and have very limited, if any, English skills, to a medium where they could express themselves and explore their own creativity. Tuchman brought a Polaroid camera with her and “a ton of art materials.” The girls took photos and made picture frames from assorted colored popsicle sticks that they decorated with glitter, shells from Lake Victoria (which is near the rescue center), and paint. They were also introduced to crayons, water color paints, markers, and journal writing (in Swahili).
Tuchman, whose research interests center on substance abuse, HIV/AIDS, and menopause, sees many opportunities for collaboration and research across a number of programs in Tanzania. She is currently collaborating with a Tanzanian assistant research professor at the University of Washington and an assistant professor of behavioral sciences and international family health at the University of Texas on a NIH/NIDA proposal to develop and test different models of substance abuse/HIV prevention treatments in Dar es Salaam.
