Mambo!

Hello to everyone from rainy Stone Town. The short rains have arrived, but I have problems understanding the word 'short' in the phrase. The rains have neither been short in length or small in amount. I'm Markus (pictures will follow somewhere in the future) and I arrived to Zanzibar last week. I'm here for two months to work with the Live-project and to collect materials for my master thesis.

The first week went by quickly in adjusting, getting things organized and participating a GIS conference. To be honest it was rather absurd situation to participate in a GIS conference in a tropical island, but I can't complain :D This, second week, I have worked with Live-project. Our project is coming to its end and I'm here to take part in the planning of a new project. On Monday I met Tamrini and the others from the Forest department working with Live. We shared some ideas about the new project and planned the fore coming schedule. The new project is dealing with issues of food security, so on Wednesday we had a meeting with the director of Food security department and talked with her about our idea. She gave some new ideas and offered her help for the future.

Yesterday we presented our idea to the Kiwengwa-Pongwe Forest Adviser Committee (or something like that), which included village leaders and other important people from the villages surrounding the forest. In the meeting there were long discussions about how to prevent illegal fuelwood collection and stop people from hunting those small antelope looking creatures. The discussions were long and it seemed like everybody had something to say about every issue, luckily Othman translated to me, otherwise it would have been just three hours of wondering and bewilderness.

Next week we are going to start the village visits, a welcomed change to flooding streets of Stone Town.

Until then,
Markus