After graduating from the University of Portland in 2007, Malibu native Sabrina Landworth moved to Spain for one year to teach English. She then decided to volunteer, through an organization called International Volunteer HQ, in an orphanage called Paradiso Mpya in Tanzania, East Africa. The orphanage is headed by an elderly couple who have 10 children of their own.
Landworth lived with a host family of 20 people, in a tiny house amongst thousands of banana trees.
“They didn’t have electricity or running water either, so we showered with buckets of water and ate by candle light,” Landworth said.
Landworth calls it “one of the craziest yet most rewarding experiences” of her life. She spent a month and a half in Tanzania teaching English to 17 young children between the ages of three and nine who speak only Swahili, doing arts and crafts, playing sports, and helping with cooking and cleaning in the orphanage.
“These kids live in really poor conditions with no electricity, no running water, barely enough mosquito nets to cover them all to prevent them from getting malaria, and not nearly enough information to protect them from contracting HIV AIDS,” Landworth said. “But they are surprisingly some of the happiest kids in the world because they really appreciate the little that they have. I really got attached to them and wanted to take them all home with me!”
The couple that runs the orphanage are hoping to remodel and expand it to create a better living situation for the orphans who currently live there. “Although these children are happy, they really deserve more stable and healthy conditions and I really hope that someday they are able to do so,” Landworth said. “It was so interesting to experience the relation between the beauty of the country and many of its people and how this culture goes about their daily life facing this kind of poverty.”