Jeff Snow (center, back row) stands with volunteers from the Mwangaza Foundation and locals of Songea, a small village in Tanzania. Pictured center is the village’s mayor.
A young boy walked into the clinic with so much plaque on his teeth that he couldn’t close his mouth or smile. His own mother hadn’t heard him talk in nearly two years. After hearing on the radio that an American dental team was going to be in the local clinic, the boy and his mother walked to see them.
But the team’s dental machine kept overloading and breaking down, so all power tools were rendered useless while volunteers used everything from refrigerator parts to tin foil to repair it.
“I thought we were doomed,” recalled volunteer Vearlene Snow, a retired dental hygienist in Redmond. “I grabbed my hand tools while they tried to repair the machine, and scraped away at everything that had built up on his teeth.
When we were done, he smiled and said ‘thank you’ in Swahili. The entire clinic burst into tears.”
Health care is one of the four areas of focus that the Mwangaza Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in Redmond, seeks to address in the impoverished village of Songea, located 20 hours from the capital of Tanzania. Food, shelter and education for children are the other kinds of support the organization seeks to provide.
Snow met Flora Komba, the founder of the Mwangaza Foundation, through a mutual friend at St. Jude’s Parish.
Komba grew up in Tanzania, experiencing the rise of HIV/AIDS, extreme poverty and high orphan rates. She wanted to help, because when children of deceased parents were given to different families, often children stopped going to school and were forced to stay and home and work.
She began the Songea Women and Children Care Organization (SWACCO), and after moving to the United States, started the Mwangaza Foundation. SWACCO executes all programs in Tanzania on behalf of the Mwangaza Foundation. “Mwangaza” is a Swahili word meaning “vision for self-reliance,” according to the organization’s mission statement.
Komba’s sister started a second branch of the foundation in Japan in early 2007.
“Flora was so passionate about what she was doing that it was contagious,” Snow said. “It took five minutes and I decided I was in. I came home, told my husband Jeff I was going to Africa and it was decided.”
Komba’s ailing health left her unable to run the Mwangaza Foundation, and she asked close friend Jeff Snow, Vearlene Snow’s husband and the chief financial officer of a Redmond-based company, to take over her role as president and to fulfill the organization’s mission of helping the children of Tanzania. Komba passed away from cancer in December 2013.
Ashley Walls is a student in the University of Washington Department of Communication News Laboratory.
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