In 2017 we launched Supply the Love! We supply the camera and film and you supply the love. We would love to have you be an ambassador of Print the Love! If you are traveling to an under-resourced community anywhere on the globe in the next year and would like to participate in spreading random photo kindness to the local people, lets chat! Together we can make a difference! Application is online.

The Supply the Love program is 100% supported by donors. If you are not travelling, you can still donate funds towards the camera and film for those who are.

As part of the program, we ask that ambassadors write a short description of their experience. All the words are their own.

Anne in Tanzania

I found out about Print the Love as I was planning a trip to Tanzania. Because our itinerary included quite a bit of contact with local people, Print the Love sounded like the perfect project to take along!

Our friend and group leader, Welcome, had made several trips to northeastern Tanzania in previous years and had established a relationship with a village near Karatu. Over the years, groups have been involved with service projects in the village with input from the school council and village leaders. This year's project was to address girls' health and safety in the secondary school.

Through fundraising events prior to the trip, money was raised to build a secondary school girls' restroom and to purchase menstrual kits for the girls through the nonprofit program Days for Girls. The kits have washable, reusable pads and shields that allow the girls to stay in school throughout the month.

In addition to providing over 300 finished kits for girls in the village, the women in our group taught the girls and several adult seamstresses how to cut fabric, assemble the pieces, and sew the shields and pads for more kits. Our hope is that the entrepreneurial seamstresses will pick this up as a business and continue sewing kits with the materials we left behind.

While we instructed the girls on how to assemble the menstrual kits, we took breaks to take pictures, both with our cameras and with the Print the Love camera. The girls loved looking at their pictures on our phones and cameras, but the pictures from Print the Love are theirs to keep!

The six men in our group painted the girls' restroom. The restroom will provide a safe space for the girls to retreat when they are not feeling well. The menstrual kits allow them to keep going to school, but the bathroom allows them safety when changing pads or cleaning up.

In addition to the service project in the village, our trip included safari wildlife viewing, and visits with tribes in their villages and camps. Three of the tribes that we visited in the Serengeti area were the Datoga, the Hadzabe, and the Maasai.

Hadzabe are one of the world's last hunter-gatherers. They live a nomadic, decentralized existence in northern Tanzania. They hunt every day to exist on a diet of meat, honey, and roots.

Hadzabe tribe chief explaining how they hunt

After the chief's introduction to how the Hadzabe hunt, we accompanied several hunters on their daily hunt. Hanging back, we waited until the lead hunters found the hornbill nest they were looking for to harvest three fledglings still in the nest.

Hornbill are hunted for meat, feathers, bones, & the beak

After the hunt, I took pictures of the chief and the others watched as the image developed in real time. Once the other Hadzabe saw what was happening, everyone swarmed around me for a picture.

The women, who had been less involved in greeting us, gathered their children and came to me in family groups. The hunters struck poses with their bows and arrows for their pictures.

The Datoga are pastoralists and are skilled at metalworking. They live near the Hadzabe and supply them with iron tips, knives, and spears in exchange for tubers and fruits. We watched as a Datgoa man melted a piece of scrap metal (a brass faucet) into a small trough over an open fire and poured it into a form. He cooled it and hammered it into a metal decoration.

Datoga women make beaded jewlery for sale

The Maasai are a semi-nomadic people who use cattle and their by-products for everything from food to building materials. The Maasai culture includes crafts such as beadwork, with beads produced from local materials (clay, seeds and bone). Some Maasai welcome tourists into their villages to display their dancing and sell hand-crafted jewelry. We had several opportunities to interact with Maasai.

Giving pictures to people in Tanzania was far more rewarding than I anticipated. My favorite memory from taking pictures in Tanzania was of an older man, a guard in the village where we worked with the girls. More than any of the others, he seemed to never have had a picture of himself. Later in the day, hours after the picture was taken, we saw him taking it out of his pocket and looking at it.

Supply the Love: Tanzania

Anne in Tanzania

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