The Stamp Man

Wherever we are we meet and make contact with people and I suppose forge relationships without really knowing the people involved.

One such person was the young man who had a stall beside the post office in Arusha. He was a friendly young fellow and every time I passed by him we would shake hands and we would just make some friendly conversation. Although our relationship lasted for the seven years we were there, I never knew his name nor he mine. He had a neat wooden stall - really just a table with a built in chair.
He made rubber stamps out of old car tyres and carved them only with a razor blade. Many times I looked at his work with interest and he would proudly show me what he could do. He was very skilled!
I asked him to make a stamp for our project with DME and he made it for us selling us the stamp pad as well. He made a very good job of it - sadly I have no copy now to show.
We used it on all sorts of documents and it was useful for some official stuff that perhaps stretched the truth a bit. But after all it was our logo and important to us.

The thing I always wonder about chance acquaintances is where do they live, and what about their family life? When I first met this guy, he was quite young - had he married over the years? Questions that will not be answered to me, you can't know everything I suppose. But I hope he is doing well.

This is a T shirt produced from the stamp my friend had made. We raised funds and had a stencil thing made for printing on T shirts. The plain T shirts were also made locally. We produced a lot of these shirts and used them for gifts to people who helped within our projects and as prizes for school kids who had done well in their particular environmental project.

Funny how things turn out though. We were in Christchurch (NZ) during one of our breaks and we wanted to get some pens printed for the project. I can't remember their name, but a company in Sydenham we visited understood what we were doing and asked if some T shirts be of use to us. They had made a mistake in the spelling of whatever they were supposed to print, so they can only dispose of them by giving them to garages to wipe oil! We were welcome to them! We were very grateful.
Our trip back to Tanzania started with Qantas and of course we would have been stung by an overweight charge on our baggage. I phoned them and after showing proof of what we were doing, the freighted the T shirts free of charge and for that we thank them.

I still have an inward smile to think that we were able to give kids brand new clothing (albeit wrong spelling) which they had earned through their good work and in most cases it was the very first item of brand new clothing they had owned in their life! That's got to be good.