Public art in Dar
The wife of one of the managers at Twaweza, Arienne Mahieu, has spent a few years, on and off, on getting a public art piece installed at Coco Beach, quite close to where I live. Sponsored by, among others, the Dutch embassy, the inauguration of the piece, four concrete and tiled benches, was quite the event, with a poetry reading, live music and a series of speeches. And though the majority of the attendees were Dutch soccer moms, with the locals who accidentally were strolling or lounging in the area looked on in amazement, the whole thing wasn’t an unpleasant affair.
Arienne threw together a website to document the run up to the opening.
Besides any reason being good enough for me to get free drinks, the event was special in that there’s very little public art in Dar.
At the event, I met Pernille, who’s Danish. To illustrate how small a world it is, we discovered that she knows, Jesper, and Alexandra, both of whom I worked with in Afghanistan, at DACAAR, who have really ramped up their website.