Anna's mother struggled to support five children after her husband was injured in a mugging. When Anna reached adulthood, she thought life might be better if she got married, but it has come with its own challenges.
Anna, 26, is the first born of five children in Arusha.
She completed standard seven and passed the exams so she had the chance to go to a government secondary school.
In her first year of secondary school, her father was coming home from work when thieves attacked him and cut him in the back of the head with a bush knife. He still has a visible wound to this day.
He continued to go to work for a year but then he started having psychiatric issues and was unable to continue.
With her father at home, it came down to her mother to find the money to feed the kids and buy school supplies, so she began raising cows.
“My mother was helping me buy these things but it was hard because my brothers and sisters were also in school,” Anna said.
After failing her exams she was not able to continue on to her A levels at a government school, so her mother borrowed money to put her through a computer course.
Still she stayed at home for a year without work to do, before finding a job in a bakery, which turned out to be exploitative.
“There was one night when we started early in the morning and worked until midnight without extra pay,” Anna remembered
“They were paying us 100,000tzs (£32/$43USD) per month but they would take out our bus fares, breakfast, lunch and dinner from that money.
“I found that at the end of the month I got nothing.”
After quitting she spent two more years at home before deciding to get married at 21.
“I thought maybe it would be better to get a husband and life would be better than staying at home not doing anything,” she said.
That same year she gave birth to her son named Laurence, now four years-old.
Laurence was born with a problem with his testicles and was meant to have an operation at three months old – but they had no money to pay for it.
When he reached seven months they managed to borrow the 300,000tzs (£97/$130USD) it cost and he underwent a successful operation, but it made their lives very hard.
Anna said: “Because both of us didn't have work we were fighting to pay back the money we had borrowed from the neighbours. It was a very bad situation.
“Life became very bad. Sometimes we decided not to eat lunch so we could get something for dinner.
“We have a good relationship with a shop keeper nearby our home so sometimes we borrowed from him.”
Anna remains married to her husband but admits the relationship to be '50/50.'
“He isn't good completely, but I'm used to this life,” she said.
“Because we have a child, we have to fight together.”
When our late founder Mama Happy visited a neighbour she met Anna and told her to come to Perfect Vision, so she did, starting in September 2020.
Anna has space at home, so she now has modest hopes of obtaining the money to start raising chickens.