Headscarf Bethsaida Girls Secondary School Orphanage handmade note cards from Tanzania BGSS9

While I lived in Tanzania for 7 years I started buying these little cards in this bakery I frequented.  Then I finally contacted the man who runs the orphanage and asked him if I could meet the girls?  I wanted to see for myself if they were safe and if the little products I’d been buying in large quantities were going to good use.

The girls showed me how they make their cards – but mostly they wanted to play with my hair, which they did, a lot.  loved visiting with them and learning their names. It will be really, really cool to support the work they are doing. The girls are safe there, and it’s clean, and there is clean water and electricity and no men to frighten them as there certainly would be here for orphaned women.

In the words of Jimmy Carter women are the most vulnerable population on this planet.  For so many reasons I want to connect GypsyFaith to this dear, tiny, place that protects women.  Each of these cards is unique and has been touched by the hands of my sweet girls there at the orphanage.  They painstakingly cut out each one and then do many folds to create the image.  The envelopes they attach are flimsy, not fancy, and certainly the best they can find in Dar.  They use both local cloth and fancy papers and the tiniest bits of sticky tape to make their art.  Each one is a masterpiece and of course one of a kind.

If you purchase a card, you support their work.  The girls do many designs, but I chose this one because it affirms their beauty and reminds me so much of the glory of Tanzanian women.  The women there do magnificent things with their hair, but often they wrap their heads in either kanga or kitenge cloth and when you walk through a sea of women there is so much fashion just on their heads.

Each card is about 6 x 4 inches or 15.2cm x 10.1 cm, and the envelope is not actually a perfect fit, but slightly too large for the card as you can see.

$2.00