Melissa and her husband came to Tanzania this January from the United States, on their honeymoon. Like most couples, they were after beautiful places and memories to keep. A friend recommended they travel with One Heart Travel Limited, and they did.
The trip was straightforward in the way a good trip should be. Airport transfers, tours, and excursions across Arusha and Zanzibar were arranged for them, and they got to simply enjoy it.
What they may not have known is where part of what they paid was going.
One Heart Travel is not an ordinary tour company. It was built to fund something. In much of Tanzania, children born with heart conditions face long odds: diagnosis is hard to reach, treatment is expensive, waiting lists are long, and the public health system is already stretched thin. The One New Heart Tanzania works to change that, screening children, reaching a diagnosis, and getting them to treatment through a network of hospitals and partners. Like most non-profits in low- and middle-income countries, its hardest problem is not will but money that lasts.
One Heart Travel is one answer to that problem. It is a social enterprise: half of the company’s profits go directly to funding heart care for children who need it. A honeymoon in Arusha and Zanzibar becomes, quietly, part of how a child gets to treatment.
That is the idea. Tourism that Tanzania already has, redirected so that it eases the burden on public health services, protects families from ruinous medical costs, and supports local jobs at the same time.
Melissa and her husband came for their honeymoon. They left having been part of something they had not gone looking for.
