I walked to church this morning with Mama Maristella. We walked slowly, far behind the snaking, clustered line of girls, all dressed in their matching outfits: the eldest students in light-blue dresses with white collars, cuffs, and trim, the middle years in identical bright-green dresses, and the youngest in a totally different mode all together: pocket-less creations of black and white gingham.

I had begun with two of the girls in gingham—we were all late for the 8 AM departure time—but we soon caught Maristella, thunking along slowly on her own at the back of the group, the clay soil of the road giving her great trouble.

It took the two of us a long time to reach the church, the humidity and the heat slowing us perhaps more than Mama Maristella’s badly-twisted, clubbed foot. Indeed, I often forget Maristella’s disability; it is only when she walks that it is apparent, and even then, the bright attention of her face—cocked, a bit pained, twisted towards one shoulder in order to help leverage her lagging leg alongside—is anything but impaired.

Although Mama Maristella did not found Olania—that was done, curiously enough, by an accountant in the National Ministry of Energy and Minerals—she is the school. It is Maristella who goes unpaid whenever the school cannot meet its operating budget, trying to prevent the other teachers from realizing how strapped Olania is for funds and abandoning the school. Every year it is Mama Maristella—with her painful clubbed foot—who travels from end to end of the country, financed by whatever donations can be scraped together, interviewing orphans and trying to bring back the most needy to Olania. And it is Maristella who teaches the girls to tie their kitenge skirts, who lectures them on avoiding snakes in the long grass, who makes them into her children.

I tried to speak with her, as we labored slowly along—Mama Maristella bridling and hurriedly limping to the farthest edge of the roadside at the sound of every approaching car—about Olania’s finances. Maristella understood my description of a 501(c) only vaguely, turning the conversation instead to their unfinished laboratory building—stalled for lack of funds in the shell stage, decorated with hanging conduit, piles of cement powder, and uninstalled sinks. She talked, too, of how the school does not have enough money to hire teachers licensed to instruct Forms V and VI, the years of high school necessary to complete the college entrance exams and earn university scholarships. Nor, apparently, does Olania have enough money to pay the fees of the local, government secondary school, where the girls might study these final forms while continuing to live with Maristella. Maristella literally wrung her hands and, unfolding her handkerchief, wiped the perspiration from her forehead, as she thought of how, come September, she would have to send all her Form IV students back to the lives she had rescued them from.

I am not sure how Mama Maristella bears it—I, outsider that I am, felt infected by despair as we talked. I am also not sure what can be done—for, as briefly as I have been here, I am convinced that something must happen. Even as there was need in Buguruni—need to finance mosquito nets, distribute sanitary birthkits, offer free HIV testing—there is an essential need here, too: to teach young people—young women in particular—to want more, to know more, to understand more than their parents did. These are the young women who will demand mosquito nets, safe deliveries, and protected sex.

In trying to articulate “what can be done,” I struggle, too, with the ethic of “successful mission”: of not “doing for” but rather “doing with”. I sit here and dream of grants to finish the laboratory, of sponsors to pay the $60 a term to send the high-performing students to Forms V and VI at the government school in Mbezi, of a formal connection with some organization who can provide regular funds. And then I poke holes in all my little bubbles: who will send reports back to the grant-providing organization? Who will communicate with sponsors and send them reports, letters or photographs from the girls? Who is able to check email, update the website, coordinate internationally, network, or write grant applications?

What I am asking myself—and I hate myself for thinking like this—is who can be Olania’s permanent Mzungu? And is there another way? How can one set up something that is (to use Priscilla Z’s old refrain from my Buguruni days) “sustainable”?

And—and this is the worst part—despite one year spent hither and yon in Tanzania, I still have no idea.