KISEDET organizes “responsible tourism trips”, to combine the pleasure of traveling with respect for places and people, as well as visiting our projects on site.
Through this trip, you will be able to know the wonders of Tanzania (parks, Indian ocean, and much more) and visit the projects of KISEDET and other associations where you will be hosted during your holiday. By staying in these facilities, you will make a significant contribution to the realization of ongoing projects.
Contact us to get your personalized trip: kisedet@gmail.com
“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Another way to travel: in words
In July 2018 we spent about two weeks in Tanzania, visiting Kisedet’s projects through a trip proposed by the Viaggi e Miraggi agency. We are a family with three children: Iacopo aged nine, Marta and Giulia aged fifteen. We started with a strong desire for knowledge and also a bit of apprehension, especially thinking about possible health problems. However, the warm welcome and constant presence of Nino, Giovanna and Julius, Baraka, Daudi accompanied and guided us throughout the journey.
After a short visit to the city of Dar es Saalam, we went to Dodoma where Kisedet operates. We spent a few days in Chigongwe village with the children hosted at Chigongwe family, a shelter home for street kids. The sunsets, the baobabs, the colors and the enormous spaces of the African landscape are still in our eyes, but certainly the joy, the welcome, the vitality of the children, the ball made of rags, the games made only with the hands, they left an even deeper mark. The days were spent visiting the village and other nearby villages, schools, the lake, the health dispensary, participating in Giovanna’s yoga classes; we spent the evenings watching the sunsets, playing football and singing songs with the children and young people of the center.
In Dodoma, we visited the Shukurani shelter home and the drop in center.
Accompanied by Julius (Baba kiri) and Baraka, we went to Mwanza on Lake Victoria, where we met the children, young people and operators of the day center for street children, run by the Cheka Sana Tanzania association. The morning was spent participating in the children’s games and activities; in the evening we had the opportunity to follow the Cheka Sana operator in his usual tour in the city center, during which he talks with the boys and children, trying to keep in touch with them and inviting them to participate in the activities of the center.
It was the first time we had traveled to Africa; we would not have wanted to meet Tanzania in any other way. The landscapes are certainly breathtaking, but we still have in our hearts all the people that Nino and Giovanna’s work and their life dedicated to Africa have allowed us to meet.
A big hug to all of you
Iacopo, Marta, Giulia, Silvia, Simone
July 2018
We went to Tanzania this summer, it was long time since we wanted to take a different trip, to discover a world that is so far away for us, and this year we finally succeeded.
With our 11 and 8 year old daughters we embarked on a new experience, for all of us (no one had ever been to Africa before) that already fascinated and attracted us on paper.
But when we got there, our expectations and perhaps our imagination have completely crumbled in the face of a reality so intense and so different that it leaves us breathless.
I am not only talking about the possibility of coming into contact so closely and so intensely with Africans, and Tanzanians in particular, but also being able to see closely, as we were Tanzanians, places and people and situations that certainly we would NEVER have been able to approach with a tour operator or by going alone. All this thanks to Kisedet, something for which we can only thank every single person who works there and who accompanied us, told, explained, showed us, which allowed us to immerse ourselves totally in a society and in a culture that we perceived so distant.
Above all, we had the opportunity to closely see an experience, Kisedet, created over twenty years ago by Giovanna and Nino, and only by ‘touching it firsthand’ were we able to understand its complexity and the difficulties in operating and carrying out such an undertaking.
Giovanna and Nino, who still work in the field side by side with local collaborators, who in part have made them grow and trained, and who day after day try to alleviate the sufferings of those children abandoned on the street to try to give them hope for a possible future, and that in over twenty years many of them have given it a future. Or they showed them that a different life is possible.
The humanity that has always surrounded us every day has been huge and very intense and we returned home with our suitcases – and perhaps our heads too – a little more empty of things, of objects, and a little fuller of faces, colors, flavors, words.
We will definitely come back and we will also try to give a little help from our comfortable sofa!
Lavinia & Mauro with Clelia and Frida
Actually Mauro is the Vice-president of Gruppo Tanzania
RETURN TO TANZANIA, OR THE METHOD OF MADNESS
I returned to Tanzania 7 years after my last (and first) trip there. At that time I had narrated my journey with the strong colors of “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad, outlining the two protagonists of the KISEDET’s feat – Giovanna and Nino – as two crazy people in the same way as Kurtz, the protagonist of that novel. With the difference that they had brought light and not horror to the savannahs and dusty life of Dodoma and its surroundings.
Well, this narration of mine will refer to my other favorite great masterpiece, that is “HAMLET” and not because it is a tragedy, on the contrary… it is a splendid comedy, which is often tinged with the colors of tragedy, like the stories in our book “FIORI DI STRADA ”show us (by the way, for latecomers and newcomers there are still copies available, contact us on the usual channels and do it immediately….). Hamlet, as we know, pretends to be crazy to understand what happens at court and someone notices it, so much so that he says: “even if this is crazy, however there is a method in his madness”.
A splendid comedy/madness, where by now many are the actors involved, in addition to the protagonists …. the KISEDET staff has expanded because KISEDET has become bigger, because in the meantime it has activated various partnerships, including international ones, and also because the growth required a greater number of people – believe me, highly qualified and humanly up to such a difficult but at the same time satisfying task, if you reach the objectives, but even if you sometimes fail, because no one is perfect and the stories often unpredictable and unforeseen developments, especially if, as Giovanna, Nino and their collaborators do, children and adolescents are made active and aware of their actions — no one decides for them!
But the number of children and families that KISEDET has helped over the years has also increased (for the numbers and figures, I refer you to our websites) and to confirm this, try looking at the photos of the KISEDET 20 years party (1998-2018): in addition to having taken them myself (and this is already a considerable value … ahahaha) look at the people and their faces, the scenes of celebration, of happiness in being together, elderly and young people, children and adults. I was delighted to participate and document it! I couldn’t exercise my passion for photography in a better, more exciting and more humanly engaging way.
The madness of Giovanna and Nino could only set this party, and the key project of KISEDET, aimed at the recovery of the street children of Dodoma, in CHIGONGWE … a small and semi-hidden village in the windswept savannah surrounded by aridity of the Tanzanian soil which, however, coincidentally, near the shelter is colored with green and trees, plants, various fruits and even animals (it is the kingdom of a beautiful goat won by the boys last year in a competition I do not remember a lot …): another splendid madness, I would say.
Some former street children are now parents, althought very young. Others are also skilled and competent workers (waiters, cooks, drivers….). One of them, Japhet, “a racing driver”, named his second son Gioven in my honor: sorry if it’s not enough!
In short, I had left a teenager Kisedet (14 years old), even if very robust and determined, and I found him a young adult (20 years old), much stronger, grown up, much more robust and even more determined.
You will agree that there is a method in this madness, right?
And since if they are not crazy we do not want them, I hope that some of you, reading these few lines, feel encouraged to enter the fray or to push harder because, as they say in kiswahili, “Adòss che ‘l muntù è l’é gross “!!!
Asante sana.
Giovanni Iannaccio
Vice-president of the Tanzania Onlus Group
Actually Giovanni is the President