I was beginning to have doubts in how effective my organization really was, since all I had been hearing was problems and there solutions that somehow seemed to not always make sense to me. However, yesterday afternoon at WEECE, I was able to be a part of something really simple but also pretty special. One of WEECE's projects are vicobas. Vicobas are village community banks, and each WEECE member community has a vicoba. When, Jenny, the young, really vibrant sewing teacher and former WEECE student, invited me to be a part of Vicoba, I didn't understand how I could be a part of the bank. When I opened the black WEECE gates on our bumpy, muddy road, I was surprised to see a line of women wrapped in kangas, brightly patterned fabrics singing and dancing in a line in circles. Mama Aurelia, the other, older sewing teacher, grabbed me and threw me into the line of women and wrapped me in a kanga. The song they were singing was about how women carry everything on their backs, which is why they were bent over as they sang. Not only does she carry the children but the water, the family, the work and the heart. After about 30 minutes of learning the song, Vivian, the American grant writer who is visiting, came into the gates and we performed her. The performance felt like the start of a celebration, which made me question how this had anything to with banks. However, as the songs concluded, the women became very serious and sat on the porch covered in a vine of yellow flowers. In the middle of the porch was a table that had a large, red metal box on it. Three women, one a massai women in distinct, red massai clothes and tattooed lines on her face being one of them, opened the box with three different keys. No one could get into the box, or what I soon learned the vicoba bank, without all three women present. Soon after the box was opened, the women got to work crunching numbers, counting the little money they had and recording all of this info, in a small blue book. The women never used the words money or shilangi (tanzanian money) as Mama Enylisia, the masai women, explained to me that that would be bad luck. Instead, they referred to some money as goats and some as cows. These women were the most efficient bankers. When anyone would put money in the red box, she would yell out how much she had and then four others would count to make sure. Everything was so exact and accounted for. Morgan Stanley could learn a lot from them. Everything was business and serious until the padlocks were back on the box. After that, the women lifted a kanga covering another table to reveal lots of food. This was almost a perfect representation of life in TZ; things are serious in one moment but people still find room for celebration and community.