Jafari Haji

Jafari was born on 11/11/1993 and we started sponsoring him in the fall of 2002, right before his 10th birthday. This little guy is sharp as a tack! His letters to us are long, detailed, well-written, and he asks lots of questions. :) His first two letters asked if we would come visit him. Finally I had to tell him that the trip to Africa is very expensive and while we would like to, it would take us many years to save up for it. We are planning to take a sponsor trip one of these years. If they have one in 2007 or 2008, we will very likely go. The last one was in March of this year and the itinerary sounded wonderful, even with the horribly long flights to get there. We would have to fly from here to Newark, Newark to Amsterdam (almost eight hours), and then Amsterdam to Tanzania which is another eight hour flight. From here to Arusha it would be somewhere around 24 hours travel time including airport check-in and layovers. I can't even imagine how awful that trip is going to be, especially if something goes wrong with the flights! But we would get to spend a day with Jafari, see the Ngorongoro crater, and take a safari in the Serengeti National Park.

Here is a picture of Jafari and his mom.

There are four children in Jafari's family and he does not have a father around to help. His mother is sometimes employed as a seller in the markets, and Jafari helps her.