Friday, May 22, 2009

One week left

Hello all!

Only a bit over one week left of this trip.
We have finished the village visits. Now we have started to go through all the interviews we made. This should take a few days, as there is quite a lot of people we have interviewed.

On Tuesday we had an exciting day. We had left from the last village and were driving along this small road near the forest reserve. There we met some guys with a big load of wood which was apparently illegally cut from the forest. It took some time to talk with the guys and move the wood from their wagon to our car. Then it took some more time to report about them at the police station. Apparently they will get a big fine which can be something like 300 000 TSH (one years income for many people).

Tomorrow we head to the Jozani forest to see a bit of the southern part of the island. Maybe we'll also see some more monkeys there.

Friday, May 15, 2009

News from Z'bar



Hello!

During this week we have been visiting some of the villages around the KPFR. We have visited Bambi, Tunduni, Mchangani, Kilombero, Pangeni. Also we have seen some of their schools and some of their livelihoods (like beehives). All has gone well, people have been really nice and it has been nice to see life outside Stone Town. Next week we'll continue with the visits.



Today we went to see the caves from the last project (KIWA). Building for tourist reception and toilets seem to be in good condition, water tank/pump isn't working yet but should be ready for the in july when the caves should be opened to public.



We also went for a little walk in the forest around the caves and we were lucky and saw the red colobus monkeys. There seemed to be quite many of them and we even saw one with a baby. There was also a lot of butterflies around (and bats in the caves). We also went to see another cave from which water is pumped to the nearby hotels.






Now we are off to try the Zanzibarian banana-chocolate pizza. Byebye!

-Eve and Noora

Friday, May 8, 2009

Our first greetings from Zanzibar



We survived the weekend in Dar and now looking forward for the first weekend in Zanzibar. We have mainly tried to get used to the climate and culture and also tried to find our way around Stone Town's narrow streets.
We also have visited our local coordinator and project personnel in DCCFF.
We have been planning the baseline survey with Tamrini and other staff and we have made some progress also. Next week we will start survey in the villages, starting from Bambi village. We are supposed to get the survey done during the next two weeks. At the same time we probably will visit the caves from the Kiwa- project also.
In the weekend we were planning to get to know the northern coast so hoping for a good weather!

We had a nice picture to put here but this computer doesn't accept our memory stick so sorry for that. We'll try again next time!