About Us

BIBI JANN CHILDREN'S CARE TRUST

…Is named for American journalist Jann Mitchell-Sandström, who in 2001 began building - with American and Swedish donations - a pre-school in the village of Mbagala, a suburb of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, East Africa. She regularly visits Dar with her professor-physician husband, Eric Sandström, an AIDS clinician and researcher with Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden and Muhimbili University Hospital in Dar. The couple lives in Stockholm.

Jann was inspired to help school owner Fatuma Gwao, divorced, Muslim mother of four who ran a school for 13 tots - sans any supplies - in her three-room home. Bricks a few hands high in her dirt yard outlined her dream: a real pre-school. Students moved inside in 2002. The school supplies 60 children ages 2-6 (many of them AIDS orphans) with two meals a day and snacks (the only food some children get) and a pre-school education --including English -- which is prompting graduates to excel in primary school. A first grade class opened in January 2006 and a second grade in January 2007.

In spring 2005, the Bibi Jann Day Care Centre became the Bibi Jann Children's Care Trust, overseeing the school, adult literacy classes, women's group, AIDS-orphans school sponsorship program, and now GRANDMA-2-GRANDMA (though which people may sponsor a grandmother who is rearing her AIDS-orphaned grandchildren). Some 30 bibis (kiswahili for grandmothers) meet weekly to create and perfect their crafts for sale, with the goal of becoming self-supporting.

The trust also sponsors three orphaned girls who live in the school compound with Fatuma as their mother.