re: trip to tanzania

To be honest they were not a group we had dealings with. I just saw the millworks as I was walking. As a part of our program with SIDO we provide both technical and business training. The business training is a bit silly, if you ask me, after all a group of rural blacksmiths making axe heads and selling them by the side of the road don’t really need brand awareness training.

We do teach basic safety and what not, mostly how to keep the tools in working order, but the reality is once they get going they do what they need to to get the product to market and there is no one to tell them it’s wrong. They know it’s dangerous. They know that running a planer with broken blades is wrong but they can’t just whip ‘round to Home Depot and get new ones and so the planer gets used. It’s the main reason we don’t send large power tools.

One of the purposes of our trip was to follow up, make sure the tools we provided (not big power tools) were working and being used appropriately.

We do what we can.