The Band that Could

A Handicap Musical group Straggles for recognition in Dar es Salaam poor Neighborhood

Tunaweza’s band members are a physically handicap: they have deformities of hands and legs and relay on crutches and wheelchairs to move. Six of them are disabled because of Polio, two have been disabled because of wrong injection in the hospital and one has been born with a birth defect.
Is Swahili, Tunaweza means “Yes, we can,” and the band see its name as reaffirmation of their efforts to be recognized in the Tanzanian music scene. It is a group of seven handicap people who are proving that they could be as good musicians and performers as anyone else.

Lehema Haji, 24, is one of two women in the band. She begun working with the band after Survival Sisters, and joined Tunaweza to lend her voice to vocals. Rebecca Muambujule, 23, is the other female artist and disabled by polio. Leaning over her crutches she plays the conga. During the rehearsals she is learning to play marimba.
Julius Zawose, 41, disabled because of a “wrong vaccination given at the hospital,” plays several instruments: marimba, zeze, ilimba and is the one teaching Rebecca. “We had two blind persons and an albino express interest in joining the band,” says Ishak.
Tunaweza meets to practices three times a week at a Dar es Salaam poor neighborhood of Tabora. They set up their instruments under a large acacia tree in the back of the band members house. A blue and white plastic sheet is rolled out for the guitar players to sit on and the dancers to dance. Their instruments are worn and beaten down. The rust has eaten thru the percussion and it breaks it down with every beat.
The band practices the Sindimba style of music, a local Tanzanian beat with rhythmic base beat and funky guitar. Their style includes rumba, soka and pop as they perform with a mix of western and African instruments: conga, base, solo guitar, marimba, drums, conga, keyboards and zeze.
The band is as much about the show as it is about the music. As the bands two dancers, men move their stiff legs with their hands, shake their bums and stand on their head the show may seem a bit macabre, or strange, even exploratory of their handicap. But, that is Tanzanian popular music can be.


The curious neighbors come over to hear them play. The local children sit, huddled around the laundry basket watching the spectacle and listening to the conga beat.
The band begun as an idea of Masoud Wanani, a local businessman who decided to help the disabled get their voice in the country’s music scene. “I always felt that disabled people were neglected and I wanted to find a way help them to help themselves,” says Masoud.
Masoud enlisted the help of Idi “the elephant” Tembo, 38, a disabled dancer of the Toti Plus, a popular Tanzanian musical group with national following. Idi used his recognition and knowledge of the Das es Salaam’s disabled community to put the core of the band together. Times are still tough and even now, Idi is not able to make a living from music and he supplements his income by making chalk for local schools.
The band begun in February of 2008 and since then wrote and produced six songs. “We are the first and only disabled band in Tanzania,” says Ishak Kibene, the Tunaweza’s president. Their handicap is something that unites different band members as they come from different ethnic groups. There are mostly Muslims, but there are a couple Christians.

As Tunaweza performs Raha Duniani, song of happiness, they are upbeat and smiling. They are comfortable with whom they are, and excited where their music could take them. They played two concerts and their president promises that good things will follow. In February 2010, Tunaweza band performed at the 2010 Sauti ZA Busara music festival on Zanzibar. So far it hasn’t been easy to get gigs or secure a regular performance venue. “This is not like in Europe where everyone gets a chance,” says Ishak, “but, we will make it.”
Music doesn’t see disability, but rewards talent, enthusiasm and hard work. As long as you can use your fingers, feet, mouth or teeth, you can make music. Tunaweza is as much about music as it is about acknowledgment of disabled people and Tanzanians becoming comfortable with them leading independent, creative lives.

All Encompassing Help

A Canadian sets an example of how a community rehabilitation center should be

Kathy Bowler is finally doing what, how and where she believes she should. She has learned her job over 13 years working for other organizations. Now, she believes, it is her turn to create a children’s rehabilitation center like it should be – working with mothers, giving not only the physical rehabilitation to children, but empowering them with information, motivation and hope. That has been Kathy’s way and barely two years after starting, she has plenty to show for it.
Area 35, a suburb of Lilongwe, Malawi, is as poor as Southern Africa gets. Bowler’s ‘Children of Blessing’ rehabilitation center has been here since 2007. There are no paved streets here, few septic tanks, little electricity or running water – it is a typical Lilongwe suburb where people from villages come to live while seeking city employment.
“People here often believe that the children born with a disability have been cursed. That is why I called us ‘Children of Blessing,’” says Bowler who created the program to give children and their parents not only rehabilitation, but mental, physical and spiritual support.

For some children, in addition to physical rehabilitation, the center offers a calm, safe and supportive place to escape the chaos and sometimes abuse of their homes. It is a place for the children to come back to life after a debilitating illness.
There are Christians and Muslims and people with indigenous believes and with her center Bowler strikes a balance of neighborly coexistence. “People associate us with a Christian organization, but we accept everyone. We do pray and everyone is loved and accepted here unconditionally,” says Bowler.
Bowler worked for several organizations that set up rehabilitation programs in Africa and Mexico, but was disappointed of how the programs ignored the needs of parents at home and didn’t help the families’ emotional and spiritual needs. The progress made in physical rehabilitation was often undermined and undone after the disabled child went home.

So far she set up 10 different workshops for parents with children with disabilities teaching them techniques of how to care for their children at home, how to supplement household income, etc. And January is especially a bad month for children’s nutrition in Malawi. In the middle of the rain season food supplies run low and harvest is still not gathered. The children that have disabilities are often the ones that get fed last.
‘Children of Blessing’ works out of a four room house with each room devoted to children with different physical dependencies. The biggest room, with blue and brown walls and concrete floor is set up for the children who need maximum care and cannot sit-up or roll. They are often suffering and partially polarized from cerebral malaria, meningitis and Cerebral Palsy.

In the adjacent three meter by five room number 2, children that are able to sit up around a plastic tub and play with floating toys. “Water is typically only used to wash and to have it for play is a real treat,” says Bowler. They sit strapped-in in with Velcro to blue, wooden chairs with high backs. A local carpenter and tailor make these chairs that help to strengthen the children’s back muscles and straighten their posture.
In room number 3, children are engaged in pre-school activities and in room number 4 the children are taught reading and logic puzzles at a basic school level.
A small bathroom’s shower stall serves as a place there smaller children are weighed and a place where more-abled children gain skills necessary for their physical independence. “Children are taught how to become independent as far as washing and dressing,” explains Qincey.

There is also a garden for play, an area for growing vegetables and a small structure with a window open to the street. An amputee teenager is making french-fries and selling them to local customers. Violet, a young mother of four sells roasted peanuts and doughnuts to raise extra money. Two young girls sit on the floor knitting sweaters and children’s dresses- a skill that gives them confidence and a way to make some extra income.
Some children are at the center to escape the environment of home. “The rates of incest, rape and sexual abuse are very high here. We talk about it during our work shops,” says Bowler, full of energy, charismatic and seemingly aware of everything going on in the center. She speaks directly, with a confident, calm voice to the staff in Chichewa – Malawi’s predominant language. “Now I am doing everything: PR, fundraising, payroll,” says Bowler “but, my end goal is to work myself out of my job.” She is looking where to place and how to afford professional education for her two Malawian staff, Clara and Endowanga, interested in education as occupational therapists.

To pay for staff salaries, produce rehabilitation equipment and be thinking a out purchasing property for a location in Lilongwe’s another poor neighborhood ‘Children of Blessing’ is affiliated in alliance and in partnership with Vision Ledd and several Christian organizations. The facility is supported from private and church group donations from US, Canada and Malawi itself. On a $60 thousand a year budget, with a staff of seven and two volunteers, ‘Children of Blessing’ is able to help 500 children patients.
In Malawi, when a woman gives birth to a disabled child, she is often faced with a dilemma of giving up that child, or being left by her husband. Ms. Juma, a mother of ten, chose to stay with her son Davy when at the age of three he came down with Cerebral Palsy. Now aged ten, Davy cannot sit up, not even roll, and completely dependant on the care of his mother. When Ms. Juma’s husband left her, she had no way pay for her apartment and it was ‘’Children of Blessing’ that offered her a place to stay.
Now a Chinese volunteer attentively massages the contracted legs and arms of little Davy, as the mother watches. The center is a magnet for generous, selfless group of volunteer. Some stay and help for a few weeks, others stay for months and years.
Katharine Qincey, an English volunteer working for the last year-and-a-half at he center for free. “Here you have to work with both four and 29-year-olds in one class. Its much more complex then in UK,” says Quincey




For Bowler, while the rewards of working with disabled Malawi children are the same, frustrations are much more common. Children that would live long lives in Canada and Botswana, in Malawi have to fight a much tougher fight. “Their immune system is weaker, the have HIV, they catch malaria they are malnourished,” says Bowler.
The spread of HIV, estimated in Malawi to be around 12%, is a growing challenge. While not everyone has been tested and is aware of their HIV status, it is often their children who show the symptoms of the disease first.
Bowler feels that her help is needed much more in Malawi then in Canada or Botswana where she worked before. The need for her services is staggering. In Malawi, a country of 12 million, there are only seven occupational therapists. “You can’t blame the government for this. You have to provide basic healthcare before you provide rehabilitation and that is what they are trying to do,” says Bowler.
Still, the things are slowly improving. In 2009 the University of Malawi College of Medicine set up a four year degree in Physical Rehabilitation and five of its students are doing their practice a at ‘Children of Blessing.’

Two-Wheel Solutions in Zambia

Two American Students turn a Class Trip into a Business

A university trip to Zambia led two California students on a path that resulted in establishing Zambikes, a company that is an example of how an African country can solve its own transportation needs and create high-end product with a waiting list in US.
Vaughn Spethmann and Dustin McBride, class 2007 business students at the Azusa Pacific University in California teemed up with two Zambian partners to create an unusual and edgy project of making Zambian bicycles for Zambian riders. The idealistic, Christian men answered a question weather a bicycle be any more green and ecological… then a concept of a self propelled two-wheel propulsion already is. Their project went from being a sample study in a University business class to a reality within just a couple years.


In 2008 Zambikes first entered the market with Amakasana- a right yellow metal bike with a snazzy logo. “We created a bike that is specifically made for Zambian terrain,” says Mwewa Chikamba, one of Zambikes two Zambian founders, about a bike that has a stronger carrier, reinforced pedals and simple six gears. Amakasane, is assembled from parts shipped from Taiwan and China, and assembled at Zambikes plant 16 kilometers outside Zambias capital Lusaka.
Amakasane is winning individual customers and companies all over Zambia. “Some people will come in and say: ‘I am buying this because it was made in Zambia’,” says Chikamba.
After Amakasane, Zambikes came out with its Zambulance- an invention that uses a bike with a ball attachment and a two-meter-long fabric covered cart. Before Zambulance local communities relied on wheelbarrows with welded grates to transport their severely sick and immobile patients to the clinics. Chikamba says, that a live is saved by a Zambuklance every 10 days.
One of dozens of clinics that use Zambulances is Chipata Health Clinic on thee outskirts of Lusaka. Mijohn Mwanza, the clinic’s accountant, does double duty as the Zam-driver. Several times a week he is called to bring his Zambulance to a Chiapta, known as “Little Bombay” and pedal them in to get help.


Company’s third product, the metal Zamcart, is meant to haul up to 250 kilos of goods and pulled by a bicycle tied to it with a simple ball-attachment. Zamcart is sold for $250 to small Zambian entrepreneurs hauling goods from their stores and farms. “It [Zamcart] looks like something a six grader could design,” says McBride “but it actually took a long process to get there.”
To create a high end product – a Zambikes bamboo bike, the company teamed up with California bike designer Craig Calfee. They produced a low-tech method of creating different size bamboo bike frames with simple adjustable rectangular jig. The entire process begins with choosing two-three year old bamboos for straightness and circumference. Different pieces of bamboo, grown locally, are categorized based on width and cut to size. Seven pieces make a bamboo bike from that is then tied with sisal and glued. The bamboo is soaked for a day then dried several weeks. Then a two day long process of sanding the frame begins.
“If you have passion in your heart you will be able see what others don’t. Its amazing to see that when looking at bamboo some people were able to see a bicycle or a cupboard,” says Chikamba.

The US waiting list for the bamboo bikes frames, meant to retail for between $700 and $800, is just getting longer. A bamboo bicycle frame weighs about as much as does an aluminum frame and is more absorbent of vibrations. What is even more impressive is that Zambikes produces low-impact, high-end, green product exported from a Third World country to a first world country.
In a way, Zambikes has reinvented the current Chinese model of aid to Africa. While the Chinese focus their aid on the continent on building roads and government building infrastructure, the Zambikes took the Chinese ideas of a bicycles for everyone, bamboo and provided a model that rewards the productivity of its employees is reflected not in bonuses to its shareholders, but that gives financial rewards to employees. “It is only a matter of time before someone else will bet into the business. Maybe even Chinese themselves,” says about the bamboo bike initiative McBride. “We hope to have a few years out of this.”
There is a fair amount of pride when you speak to Zambian owners of the bike.
In a country that used to export only raw materials, and relay on imports for all its transportation needs, Zambikes has already created a shift in thinking.
The success of Zambikes didn’t just come from finding several market niches. In Africa, a company has to also take care of its employee’s spiritual, social and intellectual needs. It does it to fill the vacuum left behind by a society and families decimated by AIDS and lack of male models. “Many if our [workshop] employees used to drunkards. Now they are getting married, building houses not out of mud but with brick,” says Chikamba. In two years a village where Zambikes bought land and from where most of its emploees come from is beginning to look way different.

Once a week, a pastor, or motivational speaker speaks to the 25-or-so employees of Zambikes. In case of emergency and in crisis, the employees can count on assistance and assistance in learning professions and life skills, like health and savings techniques.
The Zambikes partners are looking at other countries where to expand. The idea is to have ineventually 10 projects going around Africa and Uganda is seen as the next country.