March 14, 2017

An aspect of mentoring is to assist the mentee with formulating visions of the future, establishing goals, thinking about their skills, and to help them work out what they would like to do with their lives. With this in mind, TFFT’s Scholarship Program arranged a Career Day for over 600 Tanzanian high school-aged students in our partner schools. Some students already had a firm idea about what they aspire to do, and others were keen to explore options.

Four professionals volunteered their Saturday morning to engage with this group of young people. Each one is passionate about his or her field of work and happy to share stories of their work experience. We had speakers from four professions – architecture, law, business, and tourism. Mr. Sune Mushendwa is a young accomplished architect who is a partner in an international architectural firm based in Arusha. Ms. Elizabeth Reece is a successful businesswoman, and she has traveled to many developing countries and worked with local people to build entrepreneurial skills and microbusinesses. Ms. Desderia Philip Haule is an experienced lawyer who works for local government, but whose passion is for grass roots women’s rights. Our final speaker was a young man called Mohamed Kassim, who climbed the ladder in the tourism industry to become the operational manager of multiple luxury camps for Nomad Tanzania in the Northern National Park Circuit.

Informal mentoring was also the order of the day. TFFT’s driver, Mr. Godliving Tesha, is a law student and he advised some of our students on educational options for a law degree. Our Scholarship Intern, Mr. Yunia Emmanuel, is a teacher and he spoke to small groups of students about how he gained employment. TFFT alumni, Mr. Richard Augustino attended our Career Day to help with logistics, and he also explained his post-graduation experiences with the students.

Above the practical talk of each particular profession, our speakers inspired our children on many different levels. Mohamed spoke of how he started in a humble way and worked to build the appropriate skills for the tourism industry (such as learning to speak English, nature studies, and logistics). He showed the students that with ambition, exacting standards, and high-level goals, they can achieve unimagined successes. Elizabeth encouraged students to work towards their “sweet spot” – a place where they are skilled at and enjoy what they do, and people will pay for it. She told the young people that this is the key to balancing one’s life and finding success on many levels. Desderia’s passion for justice and empowering women got our lawyer-hopefuls thinking a different way about the law. By the end of the day, Sune found it hard to leave, as he had about 25 young people surrounding him asking many questions. I don’t think our young people had met a person quite like him before.

When asked for feedback from the speakers, all of them were pleasantly surprised at the level of interest and the number and quality of questions they had to answer. We can say that the day was very thought provoking for all involved.

 

2022-05-21T02:41:23+00:00