The charity has been running its shop from the historic building for the past eight months, but has been given just a month to move out. It is now on the lookout for a new home.
‘I’m quite desperate now to find somewhere else so that we can carry this on, it’s been great here,’ said Tumaini Fund founder and chair Dr Susan Wilson.
‘There are lots of empty shops in town or other places and we’d be really good tenants. We wouldn’t be able to pay them much unfortunately, but we’ve got a really good reference from our current landlord and we’d look after the place.
‘We would need to find somewhere that’s sensible though, we have some elderly volunteers and we need to find somewhere that’s accessible for them and be close to somewhere that people can park.’
The money raised from the shop is vital for the charity’s work in the Kagera region of north-west Tanzania.
‘We have 212,000 orphans and we’ve got five offices with 51 workers who all carry out our social work. We’ve got 411 people who work in the villages, so they take on two, three, four villages and go and visit our families and see that everyone’s all right, but it’s coordinated by our social workers in the five offices and we’re always behind in paying them, because people will kindly give me money for a well or for a house, which is brilliant, but they don’t tend to give you money for wages or social security or taxes, which we have to pay, so that’s what the money coming from the shop is for,’ said Dr Wilson.
‘We’ve been making about £300 a day, so about £2,000 a week, which is just spot on what we need because we don’t pay high wages, we pay the local wages, so that’s just enough to pay our social workers for a month.’
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