Art, koninginnedag and Hello Kitty

May 03, 2010 • Blog

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Niamh and I hopped over to the National Museum of Zambia mid April, where the Lechwe trust was having an exhibition of Zambian contemporary art. Some of it was really good.

And, at the end of the month, the Dutch ambassador was so kind as to invite us to his house. Us, together with a few hundred others, of course in celebration of the birthday of the queen. We had a most lovely infused evening, with no shortage of bitterballen and raw herring.

Meanwhile, I’m back in Dar. Now, at Lusaka airport, I was asked for my yellow fever vaccination twice. Last time I entered the country, I had to sneak past the medical controls at Dar airport because I *thought* I didn’t have proof of vaccination with me. Now, no one bothered to even ask me.
To compensate, there’s a World Economic Forum in Dar at the moment, for which many of the roads are blocked in the morning and afternoon. It’s now pleasantly quiet on the roads!

Niamh and I had Hello Kitty underwear made which is really cute. They’re the perfect HHH shorts and are the result I ended up with the hash shit last night. Now that Niamh and I can’t make our weekly trips to see the kitty Boots at Kafue’s supermarket, that’s all the pussy I’m getting over the next five weeks.
That, followed by quiz night at the Irish made for an excellent start of two more months in Dar.

Exhibiting

j-walk will be on show at the online exhibition of Open Space/Singapore/Southeast Asia. Woop!

Obama: the winning spirit

It’s the falls!

April 05, 2010 • Blog

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World » Zambia » Livingstone » Fawlty Towers

My first weekend back in Lusaka, Niamh and I went and paid a visit to Victoria Falls, or rather, Livingstone. While the girls in the house all joined a big group of local rugby fanatics on a long, long journey to Malawi, we took a 5.5 hour bus ride to the country's number one tourist attraction, which still meant getting up at 5am on Friday to catch the bus leaving at 6 or so.
The most often used service between Lusaka and Livingstone is operated by Mazhandu. You get a drink and a snack on board and the busses are in reasonable shape. However, each row still seats a tight 5 people. Both going out and coming back in, I was lucky enough to sleep most of the way, making the journey go by in a jiffy.
Well, not counting the flat tyre.

This being easter, the Falls were rather busy. And this being just after the end of the raining season, they were also rather wet, giving us showers a plenty.
And this being Africa, the entrance fee was doubled from March 1 onwards, putting it at 20 USD per person. In fact, it seemed like all excursions had their prices increased, again, to even less reasonable levels. This, in part, because the Zambian government has increased the fees for tour operators in the Mosi-oa-Tunya national park, I suppose because it's an easy cow to milk.

That's not to say that the Zambian government thinks ahead. Victoria Falls is about to lose its world heritage status because the governments of Zambia and Zimbabwe have failed to write up an extensive report on the status of the falls and its future. This might sound a bit harsh. That is, if you're not aware that the report is now more than 8 years overdue.

We slept at Fawlty Towers, the other backpacker's besides Jollyboys and significantly more attractive, with a spacious outdoor lounging area.
And on another upside, on the other side of the road from our guesthouse, the Ocean Basket has recently sprouted offspring in the form of an enveloping outdoor mall, Mosi-oa-Tunya square. With a pleasant Shoprite and several good restaurants, a very welcoming addition to the city.

On our last evening, we enjoyed the beauty of a booze cruise on the Zambezi, though without the onslaught of hippos.

Meanwhile in Dar

With a longtime Dar hasher leaving for the UK, an intimate get together was scheduled for my last Sunday before heading out to Zambia, where a few of us enjoyed the spoils of a private house on the beach, some 40 kilometers south of the ferry crossing in Dar. Except for the heavy rains, things were quite enjoyable.
Until we left, where it took us over an hour to get out of the dirt road leading up to the house, getting stuck on multiple occasions, to get through the muddy path to the main road. First using the wench when stuck, then getting help from a bunch of Pakistanis, fresh from a weekend trip on the beach. Very helpful, and even essential in getting us back on dry land, the Pakis seemed chockablock with Kilis and perhaps even drugs, 'AJ' having eyes redder than excited genitals.

McDonalds wars

Thomas Friedman, in his book The Lexus and the olive tree claimed that no two countries have ever gone to war which both have McDonalds restaurants. At the time that was true. Now, sadly, it no longer is.

Listverse.com reports that Georgia has at least one McDonalds (and was in conflict with Russia), both Israel and Lebanon do and, apparently, so did Serbia when it was bombed by NATO (though, arguably, NATO is not a country).

The middle classes, bread, tilt shifting and site building

March 27, 2010 • Blog

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World » Tanzania » Dar Es Salaam » Home

There’s no shortage of bakeries in Dar. A good thing. And not surprising in itself, as there’s money in making good bread. A pity that, so far, none of the bakeries I’ve tried actually makes any really good bread.
The bread here, though much of it looks good, goes stale quickly and starts to live a life of its own almost as fast.

Exceptions are fried breads or bread products and Indian snacks. The samosas, which most bakeries here sell too, for one, are almost always excellent, as are the chapatis.
Quite near my house, there’s a franchise bakery called Fairy Delights. Most mornings they have omelets wrapped in chapatis which, on most occasions, are rather yummy.
They also have at least two restaurants where lunch and dinner consists of extensive buffets for a mere 8000 shilling, about 4 euros. On offer are up to 30, not kidding, salads, fried breads, pizza, battered fish and shrimp, multiple Indian curries, several pilaus, a dozen or so deserts, fruits and more. A good deal if ever I saw one.

Today, I cycled along Old Bagamoyo road, the old road going north, and passed three bakeries virtually next to each other. At the first, I had an oversized chocolate cookie that, I suppose, was fairly decent, but way too crumbly for my taste.

Middle class

One of the blogs I occasionally read is Lenin’s Tomb, which recently talked about a poll, conducted in the US, which asked participants to define themselves as to which class they belonged to. No less than 45% defined themselves as middle class.

Related to this, the poll asked how the polltakers defined middle class and the results purely and only related to the financial abilities of the constituents, ‘middle class’ considered meaning things like being able to own your own home, to save for the future or to buy a new car.
This made me think about a good definition for middle class, and some contemplation made me come up with the idea that ‘middle class’, defined in monetary terms, could mean the ability of the individual members of that class to obtain sizable loans at leading market rates. This, because it implies the existence of collateral, which implies the existence of sufficient capital.
Of course, this only defines the dividing line between lower (working?) class and middle class, and would still require a demarcation between middle and upper classes.

This, in turn, made me wonder what the conventional definition of ‘middle class’ is. Interestingly, there is none, the best one probably being the loosely defined the broad group of people in contemporary society who fall socioeconomically between the working class and upper class. Pah!

Tilt and shift and focus

I’ve started playing around with a cute little app which painlessly allows you to make tilt shift focus pictures. Dollhouse, here I come.

The little app is called TiltShiftFocus.

An alternative to Blogger and WordPress

A few weeks ago, Blogger announced the cancellation of their FTP service for their blogs. Very annoying, as most of the blogs I set up through Blogger were served from non-Blogger domains. This, because of the flexibility it allowed me.

Some I ended up converting to hosted Blogger, some others, including Ismail’s website I converted to WordPress. Now that that’s done with, I discovered another platform, Singe SiteBuilder. Their website interface looks a bit clunky and for some odd reason is totally built in Flash, and it seems so are the websites you build with their service, but the resulting websites actually look pretty good, and they claim to have integrated quite a few handy tools and features, including integration with Google tools, SEO tools, social media and more.

I personally wouldn’t choose to run a Flash based website. For one, I don’t speak Flash, but being a Mac fan, and neither iPod or iPad supporting flash, I wouldn’t want to exclude a sizable portion of the market by design. However, they claim their website design package, for which apparently no coding experience is required, is particularly well suited to photoblogs. And, true, some do look quite nice.

Also, they have a free plan, but their paid plans are actually quite cheap, their most expensive plan coming in at 200 euros per year, allowing you to host unlimited domains with them, though maxing out at 60GB monthly bandwidth.

Art overload

March 20, 2010 • Blog

World » Tanzania » Dar Es Salaam » Sweet Eazy

The artsy opening of JamiiSanaa on Thursday saw a mashup of Tanzanian and Brazilian artists strut their stuff.
On Friday, at the Sweet Eazy in Oyster Bay, saw an extended version of the set they played on the beach the day before. The artists were the singer Carola Kinasha from Dar, the guitarist Ashimba from Bagamoyo and the rather impressive two man drumbeat machine from Brazil on a tour sponsored by their embassy here, percussionists Pandeiro Repique Duo. They were joined by some guy on what might have been a soprano saxohpone.

Individually, the artists are decent enough, but it was in the mashup where they really became more than the individual sounds combined, rising even higher when, at times, they were effectively creating live trip hop sounds on stage. Extremely enjoyable.

Earlier, my colleague Lorna had invited me to a function heralding her graduation at Creatives Connect, where she followed something of a business course for artists, sponsored, in part, by the British Council and the Danish Embassy. Perhaps they, that is, the British, were showing off their former colonial ties as, opposed to the night before, the free drinks included nice Tall Horse wines and a host of snacks.
Interesting was one of the artists actually having cobbled together an SMS tracking service, I suspect with the product Frontline SMS, which allows you to hook up a cellphone with a computer and then use your computer as something of an SMS server or gateway.

Public art in Dar

March 18, 2010 • Blog

World » Tanzania » Dar Es Salaam » Coco beach

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.

Chachachacha Changes!

March 08, 2010 • Blog

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World » Tanzania » Dar Es Salaam » Twaweza office

I’ve been working hard on updating a lot of things ‘under the hood’ of my website, as well as tweaking a few visual aspects of the site, only to, somehow, have the underlying database swept empty, losing me some of posts I wrote over the last week. Gotta love computers and my one week old backup.

Cutie alert

Over the last week, Niamh also made her appearance here in Dar, on a welcome break from Lusaka. We visited South Beach here in Dar, Bongoyo island and, last weekend, Bagamoyo, where we stayed at Bagamoyo Beach Resort, a friendly hotel which seemed to have seen better days, not unlike the city of Bagamoyo itself. Bagamoyo, at mild traffic an hour’s drive north of Dar, has indeed also seen better days. For a few years in the late 19th century, Bagamoyo was the capital of German East Africa, before it was moved to Dar in part due to Abushiri revolt in which the local representatives of the Sultan of Zanzibar fought to annul the control of trade by the German East Africa Company. This, with Bagamoyo being the terminus of the trade caravan route linking Lake Tanganyika with the sea, was no mean undertaking.

Now, the town feels like a poor and distant cousin of Stone Town on Zanzibar, but isn’t unpleasant, with some ruins south of the town as well as some old colonial administrative buildings and a pretty little port, with fried fish being sold directly on the bay next to the old German customs house.

Just after arriving, we bumped into two hashers (that is, they both had hashed once), and Sara alerted us to a live concert, that night, at TaSUBa. This College of Arts, formerly known as Chuo cha Sanaa, has artsy activities three nights a week, and is renowned for its annual Bagamoyo Arts Festival.

Livingstone, who died in 1873 in present day Zambia, had his body, minus the heart, carried by his porters an astounding 1500 kilometers to Bagamayo before it was shipped to England, to be buried in Westminster Abbey. So there’s a lot of past glory associated with this city.

At the beach resort, before leaving for the concert, we enjoyed an excellent seafood fondue, where we were entertained with a huge platter of kingfish, shrimp, calamari and lobster, chips, mango covered rise, and a bowl of milk as well as a bowl of flour to make our own batter to fry our fishies in. Yummy and tummy filling.

The last of FLEFF

If you’re interested, my post on FLEFF went up on their blog.

Conflict Kitchen

Gotta love the internet. I was asked to conjure up responses to a series of questions on Iran for a project in Pittsburgh, where an artists collective came up with the idea of Conflict Kitchen. Here, every few months a new cuisine from a country at loggerheads with the US will be doled out. The first subject will be Iran, perhaps not surprisingly, where the food on offer will be yummy kubideh.
The food will be wrapped in a poster which lists eleven questions on the minds of most Americans when asked about Iran. It’s these questions I was asked to respond to.

So, if you’re in Pittsburgh in the near future, you might find my name on a lone food wrapper.

It. Is. Momentous.

February 17, 2010 • Blog

World » Tanzania » Dar Es Salaam » Twaweza office

I paid off my student loan this month. Momentous!

Artsy competition

I’m still judging for FLEFF 2010, and in the meantime a not too dissimilar project is starting over in Singapore.
For an exhibition at the International Communication Association Conference in late June, they’re looking for work on the theme of ‘open space’. I always struggle with calls for proposals of this kind as they’re often rather conceptual, but in its simplest form, open space is defined as “spurring collaborative knowledges and producing new provisional microterritories through engagement. Open Space is where technologies meet people meet spaces.”
That makes some sense to me, so I submitted j-walk.

They’re particularly interested in works and artists from south east Asia. And they’re hoping to get things like alternate reality games, creative robotics and ‘innovative digitally-based cartography projects. Hence the obvious choice of submitting j-walk. However, the list goes on.

You can read up on this over at the FLEFF website.

Shake that

February 07, 2010 • Blog

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World » Tanzania » Dar Es Salaam » Kunduchi beach hotel and resort

I cycled over to Kunduchi beach hotel and resort today as the Lonely Planet claimed that, besides the water park, they also had a video game arcade. So, hoping for DDR, I cycled the 20-25 kilometers up north. Without luck,

The park, with an entrance fee of 5500 shilling, less than 3 euros, isn't bad, though, and quite eclectic. For the peeps on the wet dance floor in the middle of the complex, the DJ was alternating between African pop, Hindi tunes as well as popular Arab tracks.
What was disturbing was that, during one song, several of the throng of young local girls went down on all fours, head on the floor, booty in the air, and started shaking and grinding their backside as if they were being heavily buggered, or at least were getting ready for it.

Hello.

Bold Girls

February 03, 2010 • Blog

World » Tanzania » Dar Es Salaam » Coco beach

A reasonable performance, here at the International School of Tanganyika, of an excellent play by Rona Munro, who incidentally wrote the last multiple episode serial on the classic Doctor Who. She won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for the play.

Written in 1990, it’s the story of four lower middle class women, living in Belfast, somewhere during the 1980s, during the time of the Troubles. Their men have either been killed or are in prison but occupy an important role in the story played out on the stage.
The focus is on three women who encounter a stranger in their midst. The obvious distrust, supposedly stemming from the social upheaval at the time, only partially obfuscates the underlying currents of fear. It is then, through the subsequent escalation through the presence of the stranger, that previously hidden, inconvenient and painful, truths are brought to the surface. Though this first results in emotional upheaval, it is turned around in to a sense of hope and comfort, implicitly due to the necessity of having to cope.

Essentially, the story is about the need to deal with the futureless existence that was life in the mid 80s for most of the lower middle class in western Europe.

The play is rather emotional and very well constructed, though I suspect that, at this premiere, the actors occasionally botched up parts of their dialogue. Claudia Kennedy as the less conventional Cassie, who ruffles up the status quo at the end of the play and teaches drama at IST, is the best performer in the play, though Monica Gorman, as Marie, the salt of the earth she is, also puts down an interesting performance, though its hard to gauge whether this is because she’s such a brilliant actor, or such a bad actor. The other two actors were Rita Bowen and the interestingly named Ee Crovetto, who once wrote an article for the Lowdown.
Except for Ee, who didn’t pretend, the other three actors put forward quite believable Irish accents (which my ear is becoming reasonably accustomed to).

The program came with an introduction by director Carolien van de Waal, and is a bit rich, suggesting that the story could have been set in any country suffering from war or struggling to overcome the destructive forces of flood or earthquakes. Though this applies to the barebones story, the setting and characters are decidedly northern European.
Van de Waal goes on to mention that Tanzania is politically stable and relatively prosperous. Tanzania scores 151st out of 182 on the Human Development Index. Then again, no less than 29 other African countries, more than half, score even lower.
Tanzania also scores 89th out of 165 on the Political Instability Index.

Settling

January 31, 2010 • Blog

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World » Tanzania » Dar Es Salaam » Bongoyo island

Four days after my arrival in Dar, my prominent search for a more permanent place to stay payed off: an acquaintance of a colleague of mine was moving out of her shared apartment. I moved in the next day and am now sharing a nice place with David, a Brit, Andrei, a Ukrainian/American and his wife Mattie. It’s a bit out of town, but affordable, and close to quite a few restaurants as well as a some supermarkets.
I liked staying in town, being able to walk to several good value restaurants and just embracing the bustle of the city, but I also value being able to sit in a normal chair at a normal desk being able to make tea, breakfast or a sandwich. For those in the know, I’m quite close to QBar.

On its website, the story behind QBar is laid out: “On December 31st 1997, a teenage dream of opening a bar in Dar with a mixed crowd and a laid back atmosphere became real.”
In need for a burger and chips, my first since arriving in the country as the food here, Indian inspired, is awfully good and affordable, I went over to QBar for a meal. And, indeed, there was quite a mixed crowd, about half the patrons being working girls.

Surprisingly, Andrei turned out to have worked in Kabul at the same time I was there. As did a friend of Mattie’s, whom I met when my housemates and myself went over to South Beach for the day this weekend. What kind of odd coincidence is that?

Babak

On another note, I’ve learned that Babak used to be a municipality in what is now the Island Garden City of Samal in the Philippines. I suppose Babak needs to go to Babak.

MacTilda

The Dar Hash celebrates both Burns night and Australia Day by holding a special hash, the MacTilda. Off to the nearby island of Bongoyo for a day of running around the surf.
Burns night celebrates a ‘minor poet’, considered Scotland’s national poet, by the name of Robert Burns, who lived in the latter half of the 18th century. Burns night is celebrated on 25 January.
Australia day, celebrated on the 26th, commemorates the arrival of the ‘First Fleet’ at Sydney Cove in 1788, the hoisting of the British flag there, and the proclamation of British sovereignty over the eastern seaboard of Australia.
So, the two combined, Mac referring to the Scots, Tilda, referring to Waltzing Mathilda, Australia’s unofficial anthem, result in the MacTilda run for the Dar Hash, where the run takes the pack around the island at low tide, hundreds if not thousands of crabs running away from the onslaught of runners.

A good day out, though with an awfully early start, saw the sun beating down on the runners. To celebrate, a South African bagpipe player had been flown in, as were two sizable portions of haggis. Yum!
After run and lunch, the circle found approval as it was set in the surf, occasional mini-tsunamis rolling over the participants.

Judging FLEFF

January 27, 2010 • Blog

World » Tanzania » Dar Es Salaam » Twaweza office

Ismail, Christina McPhee and I are jurors for the Map Open Space competition for FLEFF 2010 which focuses on artworks deploying digital technologies and new media to mobilize, manipulate, and map open space, where ‘open space’ is, basically, any unchartered territory you can think of.

A total of 36 submissions where contributed. Here are a few of the more interesting ones.

+ Mapplers by Tara Pattenden, which aims to map a city using hand drawn maps by contributors. Conceptually very interesting, but there’s currently no actual implementation besides one single hand drawn map using the Google Maps viewport.

+ Farm Animal Drawing Generator by Gebhard Sengmueller, where farm animals were fitted with GPS loggers and, at the end of a few days, their wanderings copied onto a map. Though it’s both funny and innovative, it’s a pity that Sengmueller didn’t create more of an interactive environment to track the animals’ wonderings, but only displays the results through a video.

+ To Hold a Future Body So Close to One’s Own by Evan Meaney is a web gallery of twenty-seven portraits mapping [buzzword alert!] the deconstructive linguistics of encoding algorithms. By shooting video portraits and multiple re-encodings, the resulting moving images, which are extremely noisy, create a spooky atmosphere and point to the mortality of digital culture. I would have liked this to be less conventional in its presentation, because essentially it’s video art.

+ 360extended by Faisal Anwar is a platform for exploring the relationship citizens have with the place they call ‘home’, by allowing for users to post stories and photos, reminiscing on what shapes their imagery of their environment.
It’s a reasonably well executed project, but technically lacks innovation as it’s essentially just a group blog.

+ The Good Life by Carlos Motta explores the South American public opinion on the US’s interventions in the region over the last few decades. This is done through interviewing an extensive array of individuals.
The resulting work, which nicely presents the videos is interesting for its, on a international level, sensitive subject matter, though as a whole the project is more like old school reporting than new media.

+ ContemporaryNaturalism by Mauro Ceolin maps real world, loosely related sightings onto a Google Map, creating a faux Latin based taxonomy from these sightings. There’s a basis for something interesting here, though I don’t think Ceolin has yet fully tapped into this.

+ Political/Hydrological: A Watershed Remapping of the Contiguous United States by Lauren Rosenthal is a river-centered atlas of the United States based on freshwater systems, using watersheds to mark boundaries, effectively moving rivers from the margin to the center of maps. Rosenthal: “This shift alters our presumed notions of boundary and asks us to identify with and privilege water as the primary consideration for determining political identity. […] By offering this alternate organizational model, I […] propose a new, more ecologically integrated vision of the world in which we live.”
Interesting as a concept, well designed and well presented.

+ rightbasicbuilding.com is a blog of world map projections organized and constructed by the method of Constant-Scale Natural Boundary, where the edge of the map has meaning, typically the watersheds of the land area that forms the boundary. Very interesting, though only nominally an online work.

+ 17,844 Las Vegas Pools by Lizzie Hughes maps the pools within the Las Vegas city limits, creating a pointillist image of sorts.

+ New Public Sites by Graham Coreil-Allen is a meatspace walking tour of Washington DC mapped on Google Maps.

+ Camp La Jolla Military Park is a Google Maps mashup by Owen Mundy which involves a data collection which investigates relationships of power within the Military Academic Industrial Complex in Southern California. To make the information accessible, Mundy borrowed the vernacular language and imagery of the National Park System, and announced that a national park had been founded to appreciate the ongoing military history of the area, creating the mashup as a way to present the faux military park to the world.

+ Blood Sugar by is billed as “new media documentary”, an interesting mixup of interviews of 24 current and former injection drug users recorded at the HIV Education and Prevention Program of Alameda County and in California state prisons. I like the format used for presenting the project, though the audio files are a total bandwidth hog. As a result, the interdependencies between the different narratives is too easily lost.

Dar I go

January 18, 2010 • Blog

World » Tanzania » Dar Es Salaam » Jambo inn

If you type in “Dar Es Salaam” in Google and wait for the autocomplete to load suggestions, the first suggested search term is Dar Es Salaam Hash House Harriers, which was my planned second stop on the day of my arrival, the first being my purchasing a bike to get around town in. Unfortunately, the bike needed to be more than configured, causing such a delay that I never made it to the hash. In fact, this new bike was such a load of crap that it already completely broke down on the second day, after which I got a more sturdy second hand bike which actually ended up costing me more than the new one.
Traffic is rather horrendous during rush hour, which indeed points to the fact that Dar sees slightly more activity than Lusaka does, on all levels. That said, I think I will give the Tina Turner lookalike party, which is scheduled for next week, a miss.

Though the city is undoubtedly more alive than Lusaka, with a downtown area which is walkable and has several reasonably priced restaurants and cafes, finding an affordable place to stay is not easy at all. Housing catering to the expat market typically goes for several thousands of dollars per month, in a country where the GDP per capita is a mere 1300 USD per month(!). Obviously, this lopsidedness is utterly laughable. However, it also means that it’s hard to find a reasonable place to rent in the sub-1000 USD market, as I do enjoy both electricity and running water in reasonable amounts. I started staying at the Jambo Inn, the same place Niamh and I were at a few weeks back.
Incidentally, 80% of the Tanzanian workforce is employed in the agricultural sector, tilling only 4% of the land and responsible for half the nation’s GDP.

Politically, Tanzania is quite the mashup. Only existing since 1964, when Tanganyika (mainland Tanzania) merged with the Zanzibar archipelago, it’s also one of the few countries which artificially moved its capital. Here, in 1996, from the now commercial capital Dar Es Salaam to Dodoma, a hole in the middle of nowhere.
Also, Tanganyika used to be part of German East Africa, until, as a result of the first world war, the German colonial territories were redistributed amongst the victors of the Great War, Tanganyika was put under British control.

The littlest you can top up your pre paid phone cards with, here, is 500 Tanzanian Shilling. That’s about 25 euro cents. Zain offers what they claim is 3G but doesn’t excite my modem to turn on its blue led, staying green, indicating 2.5G. Nevertheless, the speed isn’t bad and with prices starting at 32.50 shilling per MB is about 8 times cheaper than Zain is in Zambia.

At Julius Nyerere airport, coming in, medical staff were asking for proof of yellow fever vaccination. I do have that but was unable to find the booklet listing my vaccinations. I stealthily sneaked through the controls, leaving the airport, only to find the booklet when opening my bag at the hotel.

Taxi fairs from the airport to town are listed, at the airport, at 35000 shilling. That’s about 18 euros. When Niamh and I were dropped off at the airport, coming from town, we paid 15000, or about 8 euros. Though I was told repeatedly that the 35000 was fixed and that discounts were not available, it wasn’t very hard to talk them down to 20000. Still too much, yes, but I also wanted to get out of there quickly in case the medical team came after me.

Progress on TAZARA

January 13, 2010 • Blog

World » Zambia » Lusaka » CIDRZ residence

The Times of Zambia reported yesterday that the Chinese are providing TAZARA with a 39 million USD interest free loan. The Chinese being the Chinese, this more likely is seen by them as an investment, not a loan, in order for the train line which connects Zambia with the port of Dar Es Salaam to supply the African hinterland with Chinese finished goods and China with African raw materials. I would not be surprised if, when the TAZARA line was built, also by the Chinese in the 1970s, this was their plan from the beginning. It would be an explanation for why the passenger service, not being a core activity of the enterprise, does not connect to Lusaka, but to Kapiri Mposhi, some 200 kilometers from the capital, and much closer to the Copperbelt.

The article revealed a series of interesting tidbits.

+ The Tanzania Zambia Railway Company (TAZARA) is financially crippled. This explains the downscaling from 4 to 2 weekly passenger trains in both directions as well as the relative sorry state of affairs of the passenger wagons. In fact, last year both Zambian and Tanzanian presidents had appealed to the railway company’s creditors to cancel debts to save the company from collapse.
+ The intention is to have TAZARA run, by concession, by a ‘competent’ railway enterprise from China.
+ Six locomotives will be purchased, 120 wagons will be repaired. The four weekly trains come in at nowhere near 120 wagons, perhaps 60, at most. This leaves at least 60, what can only be, goods transport wagons. No doubt the reason for China’s interest.
+ The decision to fund was made somewhere last year, but only now made it into the paper.
+ Chinese ‘experts’ will evaluate the possibility of linking up other countries to the rail network. However, because the rail network already links up Kinshasa with Cape Town and Dar Es Salaam, this can only imply the Chinese intention to get a proper distribution network going in southern Africa.

The day before, the papers reported that RSZ, Railway Systems of Zambia, who operate the national rail network were moving their head offices to Lusaka, from Ndola. I wonder if that’s related.

Work shmork

January 06, 2010 • Blog

World » Zambia » Lusaka » CIDRZ residence

For our ride back to Lusaka we originally envisioned taking the bus back. However, the preferred bus company has recently gone bankrupt, the, so it seems, only surviving contender providing a passable but challenging service. That, and the busses leaving on the wrong days from Dar, meant that our only real option for leaving the haven of peace was by plane, using Zambezi airways, which luckily was offering cheap return trips from Dar to Lusaka.
Gambling on my return to Dar before signing my contract with Twaweza, we both booked round trips. The gamble paid off. I’ll return in two weeks time.

Entering the country, we had another nice brush with Zambian bureaucracy. Though this time, for a most pleasant change, the immigration officer was more helpful than most.

When I obtained my Zambian visa from Brussels, I found that the wording used in the stamp in my passport was rather ambiguous. Or rather, it wasn’t too ambiguous, it was simply missing information. For one: it didn’t say how long it was supposed to be valid for, even though I paid for what was to be a three month double entry visa.
The visa did say it had to be used within three months of the date of issue. Then, after entering the country, I was assured, it would be valid for three months.

So, I got the visa on October 7. We re-entered Zambia on January 6. Indeed, just short of three months. Meaning that if I had entered the country two days later, or perhaps even one day later, I would not have been allowed to use the double entry visa for my second entry, even though my first entry was well within the three month limit.

Niamh had a harder time getting in. Her HR department isn’t too professional, resulting in the extension of her temporary work permit, as we found out at immigration, only having been validated for another 30 days, not the three months it was supposed to have been.
Thankfully, the immigration officer let us through after making a fairly simple report of the situation, not demanding any form of cash transfer.
In fact, a Dutch lady entering the country just after us, in country to visit some orphanage close to the capital, got half her visa fee waived from the same guy.

New year on the beach

January 01, 2010 • Blog

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World » Tanzania » Zanzibar » Kendwa Rocks

Niamh is more of a beach lover than I am, hence the fact that during my two years in Thailand, I not once visited one of the country's beaches. Now, with Zanzibar being a major destination for beach holidays, I didn't really have a choice, and so I arranged for us to spend the new year on the beach.
Our destination, Kendwa, almost on the northern tip of the island, saw us spend three nights at the Mocco Beach Villa. Way overpriced at 60 dollars per room per night, but still one of the cheaper venues in the area, with a kilometer or so of coastline being hugged by a series of resorts, their backs sealed off from the village by a 2.5 meter high wall. For some reason, there are so many Italians, at all the resorts, that most signs are in Italian. The many Masai, who run the little shops selling paintings and jewelry, all speak Italian before English.

We entered the new year at Kendwa Rocks, the more opulent resort here at Kendwa, where a full moon party was scheduled, complete with live music and funky DJs.
The party, rather busy and reasonably well organized, was livened up by someone dropping a canister of tear gas. Everyone poured out faster than when the place had been on fire. A teary start of the new year.

Spicy Stone Town

December 29, 2009 • Blog

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World » Tanzania » Zanzibar » Stone Town » St. Monica’s

Already on the TAZARA train, we learned that Zanzibar was without electricity and would be so for the coming weeks. Apparently, an undersea cable between the mainland and the island had snapped and reinforcements had to come from far away.
The major tourist hotspots, that is, bars, hotels and restaurants, run on generators, as did ours, St. Monica’s. Though, as with others, our generators stopped running at 1am, meaning that most of the night ended up being a sweaty, bug filled, challenge.

The story on the street is that technicians had to come from South Africa and though they managed to get the main generator back online shortly before christmas, it gave up the ghost again shortly after. However, the South Africans are said to have wanted to spend christmas and new year’s with their families back home, them coming back only on the fourth of January.
However, I find this story hard to swallow. 25% of Zanzibar’s GDP comes from tourism, as does 70% of its forex. With some two million people on the Zanzibar archipelago, it’s hard to believe that a few South Africans’ desire to be home for christmas outweighed access to power and running water for millions of Zanzibaris, let alone the longterm effects on the economy. For one, by the time we left for the beach, some three weeks after the start of the outages, cholera was starting to hit some of the outlying villages.
And, indeed. Later, I learned that the truth is slightly different. Zanzibar depends on the mainland for its supply of electricity. In the past, this was the mainland’s responsibility. But more recently, with Zanzibar re-asserting their relative independence from the mainland (Tanganyika and Zanzibar merged to form Tanzania in 1964), it was the Zanzibar government who thought it imperative to have full control of the electricity supply.
The system, as can be expected, hasn’t seen major changes since the 1960s and regularly breaks down. However, before, specialists residing in Dar, with an extensive understanding of the equipment and its history, used to be responsible for getting the system back online after a break down. Now, with the proud Zanzibaris in control, they have looked to both Norwegians and South Africans to solve their problems, ignoring the expertise available on the mainland.
Not surprisingly, the newbies were at a total loss, plunging Zanzibar in darkness for now over three weeks.

We went on a spice tour, a walk on a spice farm where a guide shows you the different crops that are being grown, giving some background on each of them, while you’re being fed the different spices as well as fruits. This was followed by an excellent lunch and a visit to a very pretty beach.
In between, a short stop at a cave, near the sea, used by illegal slave traders between 1873 and 1907, cost extra money and wasn’t really worth it. The cost of the excursion, 15 dollars, isn’t too bad, but I also couldn’t find the whole trip too special. It was entertaining, sure, but I was hoping for more. A visit to a market, for example, where we would experience the spices on sale. Or the slaves.

Stone Town itself reminded me on occasion of some towns in Iran, as well as, interestingly enough, coastal towns on the Adriatic, such as Piran.

Speed racer

Internet speeds, both in Zanzibar and particularly Dar are refreshingly good as well as extremely affordable. Just before we leave Dar at the beginning of the new year, I expect to sign a contract with Twaweza, which should see me spend a few months here early next year. I think I will be able to cope.

In Dar

December 26, 2009 • Blog

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World » Tanzania » Dar Es Salaam » Jambo inn

Not only did we arrive on christmas eve, though technically christmas day, the shia community of Dar was also celebrating Ashura, meaning that pretty much everything in town was closed.
Nevertheless, the compact center, with the strong Indian influence and several restaurants selling more than decent food and more than reasonable prices, make Dar not unattractive at all. The only challenge being the hordes of touts close to the port, all trying to sell you tours, safaris and trips to Zanzibar.

We were staying at the Jambo Inn, a very reasonably hostel, perhaps a bit pricier than the nearby Safari Inn and Econolodge, but more agreeable, brighter, with very decent service, a wonderfully friendly host, and a rather nice restaurant on the ground floor. Normally, an onsite internet cafe provides internet access for free, but due to the holidays, it was closed. A nearby internet cafe made me wet my pants with the speed available, though.

TAZARA, a challenge

December 24, 2009 • Blog

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World » Tanzania » Makambako » Train station

The Chinese were already meddling in African affairs in the 1970s, when they were contracted to build the TAZARA railway, which connects Tanzania to Zambia. As can be expected, the eastern terminus is in Dar Es Salaam, the ‘haven of peace’. The western terminus, on the other hand, is in the hole called Kapiri Mposhi, for which it’s reason of existence is pretty much just being the Zambia terminus of the TAZARA railway.
Kapiri, some 200 kilometers north of Lusaka, can theoretically be reached by train, as Zambia has its own train network connecting Livingstone, through Lusaka, with the Copperbelt in the north. However, not only are the two train networks not directly connected, there being two train stations in Kapiri, taking the local Zambian trains is also not advised, meaning you’re left with taking a bus from Lusaka to Kapiri.

I had booked our TAZARA train tickets some four weeks earlier, expecting the seats to fill up quickly in the run up to christmas. I was reasonably right, though mostly because the TAZARA office in Lusaka only sells 8 beds on each train that leaves Kapiri. Of the over 120 beds that are available on each train, that’s not a lot, at all. And because the cabins are male or female only, it’s not uncommon for couples or families to reserve a whole cabin, to allow the family to sleep together.
So, when I wanted to book, all 8 available beds for our train had been booked by one family. It took another week of phone calls and arrangements for me to be able to buy two tickets, which presumably had to physically come from Kapiri.

In the not too distant past, four trains a week plied the distance between Kapiri and Dar, and vice versa. But as this is Africa and everything slowly degrades without being serviced or upgraded, the service is now down to two trains a week, each way. And, as the train ended up being overbooked, this is clearly not because there’s a shortage of demand.
There’s practically no budget airline industry in Africa, outside of South Africa and although Zambezi Airways is offering some decently priced tickets on several routes, including the Dar to Lusaka route, for the period around christmas, it didn’t include the christmas period itself.
Niamh and I are flying back from Dar to Lusaka, a roundtrip only costing us a bit over 200 dollars, where the regular rate is closer to 400 dollars for a round trip. Our first class sleepers on the TAZARA came in at about 50 dollars, one way. The Friday train’s first class sleepers go for 40 dollars. Other classes include second class sleepers and third class seaters.

The obvious downside is the time it takes to get from one end of the train line to the other. We left at 8 in the morning for the Lusaka bus terminal. The lady at the TAZARA office told me I would have to book a bus ticket to Kapiri one day in advance, to make sure we would have a ticket. I did, but when we arrived at the bus station, having a ticket didn’t amount to much. Our bus was already fully occupied, meaning we had no choice but to take the next bus. Having a ticket in hand for the bus actually waiting on the platform didn’t make any difference whatsoever. We could have just gotten a ticket on the day of departure.
Additionally, though we were traveling on ‘Euro-Africa lines’, and, no, they don’t travel between Europe and Africa,, which is slightly more upmarket than some of the other services, we still had five seats in each row, meaning everyone was crowding everyone else. Though, the regular, smaller, busses, tend to be even more crowded, even though they run for most of the day and you definitely don’t need to book in advance.

After a rather vocal preacher had livened up the ride during the first 30 minutes, the bus dropped us off some 3.5 hours after departure at the bus station in Kapiri, where a dozen or so touts tried to sell us their taxi services for getting to the TAZARA terminal. Selecting one and getting into his car was followed by a boy trying, but failing, to steal one of our backpacks from the back seat.
Five hours after leaving home, we arrived at the terminal, still with three hours to spare before our train was scheduled to depart.

The bus from Lusaka straight to Dar takes a scheduled 27 hours and costs about the same as a first class ticket on the train. However, the scheduled travel time on the train is 43 hours, two whole nights spent on the train. Our locomotive broke down in Makambako, not long after crossing the Tanzanian border, which was partially responsible for the 12.5 hour delay we ended up having to deal with, bringing our door-to-door travel time to around 64 hours.
The border crossing at Tunduma, which straddles both sides of the border, went surprisingly smooth. The Zambian immigration officer stamped our passports without looking at our visas, meaning that if you’ve overstayed your visa in Zambia, leaving by TAZARA is the way to go. Shortly after, the Tanzanian immigration officer also didn’t take up much time stamping our passports for entry, while it was also possible, and easy, to get a visa upon arrival, as some of the foreigners, black and white alike, had to do.
Though I had booked our room in Dar, and reconfirmed while on the train, I had a strong feeling that if we’d arrived only minutes later, the receptionist would have given away our room to whomever had come first. As we arrived around 1am and all hotels in the area were fully booked, we only barely got away with a first decent night after two hot nights on the train.

Electricity on the train is only on in the evenings, and even then air conditioning and fans are not available. As not all the windows open, this can result in your sleeping cabin ending up being a little sauna. Not great, considering that there’s also a premium on running water. Though there’s actually a working shower in some of the coaches, the toilets don’t flush and don’t come with toilet paper.
There is a dining cart which serves very decently priced and very reasonable meals the whole day through. Unfortunately, they don’t accept Tanzanian shilling in Zambia and no Zambian Kwacha in Tanzania, which is of course ridiculous. The barman on our journey, on the other hand, was more flexible, accepting both currencies throughout the journey, though he was much more reluctant to exchange money. Not in itself a big issue, as on the border in Tunduma, hordes of touts exchange money and sell sim cards and airtime. However, we, not knowing that the restaurant was not going to accept Kwacha once crossing the border, didn’t give them much attention.
Also, though Zain, formerly Celtel, numbers are supposed to be portable across their whole network, from country to country, mine stopped working once we had crossed the border.

The ride across the great rift and through the mountains in western Tanzania is awfully pretty and even though our journey took about twice as long as what it would have taken us if we’d taken the bus, I probably would still recommend the train. Just being able to get up, walk around, have some food and drinks and whatnot is worth a lot.
What was more worrying, specifically in the mountains, were the scores of train carriages wrecked on the sides of the tracks. As were some of the bridges which were so small that, even hanging out of the window and looking down, were impossible to see.

In Dar, a tout offered us a taxi ride and we followed him up to the front of the train station, where he demanded an absurd 30000 shilling, some 15 euros, for a ride into town. As the walk from the train to the taxi stand was long, it was going to be impossible for him to go back and pick up another set of whities, meaning our bargaining position was strong. We got the ride for 10000 shilling. Still too much for the distance, but considering this was 1230 at night and the number of taxis was limited, this was not a bad deal.

Barcamp and plain camp

December 19, 2009 • Blog

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World » Zambia » Lusaka » Mulungushi village

Saturday saw the first Zambian barcamp, and I attended. A barcamp is something of a loosely organized open plan technology oriented conference, typically bringing together innovative minds in an informal setting. Barcamps are a great way to bring ‘geeks’ together and facilitate cross pollination of ideas and solutions as well as networking.
This one saw significant sponsoring from iConnect and no less than three Googlers attended. Though some 60 individuals registered, less then 30 showed up, including five or so from iConnect.

The eyes were on Google to sort of lead the discussions, and the baton was easily picked up by Googler Eve, with vocal input from Googler Divon. After a bit of soul searching as to what the group as a whole would be interested to talk about, I had enough time for four of the topics before I had to rush off to attend the Christmas dress up hash, followed by Christmas carols, punch and minced pie.

As could probably be expected, the topic that most attendants were interested in was Google’s strategy for Africa. Divon took the floor, explaining that Google’s focus is on growing internet usage and connectivity in Africa, not to directly benefit Google specifically. Apparently, 7% of the Zambian population uses the internet, almost only educated urbanites, Google’s goal would be to increase that significantly. Google is making their interface available in local languages as well as improving their products for low bandwidth locations. And, indeed, I’ve noticed a significant increase in performance using Google Mail over the last two years or so.
Interestingly, with making the Google interface available in local African languages, it turns out that for lesser used, non-literal languages, there is no real consensus on how words are written.

After that, the discussion slowly rolled into talking about the role of IT in education. There’s a severe skills shortage in development, that is, programming. Anyone with some expertise gets absorbed by telcos and banks. Hence, obviously, my creating LusakaLive.com, a very simple solution which fulfills a clear need but, strangely, had not been done before.
On working together with universities to establish training curricula, Divon made it clear he wasn’t too impressed with the public universities on the African continent: “Public universities are basically focussed on extracting donations from international companies.” One of the facilities Google maintains is YouTube.com/edu, which has whole courses contributed by universities. Incidentally, Apple has something similar in iTunes U.

The second topic ended up being a presentation of Google Adsense by Googler Eve, followed by a talk on how to engage government in facilitating the development (programming) community in Zambia. Divon’s suggestion was to, instead of talking about ICTs, to talk about applications deploying ICTs. That is, to talk about the applications and the value, rather than the technology.

The last topic I managed to attend was a presentation of Googler Misha on Google apps. His presentation wasn’t too bad, but his demonstration on how to create a simple Twitter-like application in minutes made me seriously consider moving to Google apps as my development platform. It would require me to learn Python though.

Camp!

After Misha’s demo, I rushed back home to make it in time to the Christmas hash dress up party. Though there was a clear gap between dressed ups and nonos, it was a lot of fun. And Lynn, who threw the afterparty, had the cutest kitten this side of the Indian ocean.

Yess, Boss!

December 10, 2009 • Blog

World » Zambia » Lusaka » Alliance Francaise

Yess, Boss is a play by the Zambian playwright and director Tsungai Garise, a rather prolific individual who seems to churn out play after play, most of them being staged right here in Zambia.

Though Zimbabwe has quite a history as far as the performing arts go, not in the least fostered by the yearly HIFA, the Harare International Festival of the Arts, Zambia is quite the backwater in said discipline.
Not that this puts mister Garise down, as this show alone is being performed five times within one week, all at the Alliance Francaise, with next week seeing five showings of yet another play by Garise.
Then again, the 30 or so spectators of the play, almost all white, indicated the general level of interest for the performing arts here in Zambia.

So, if anything, Garise has to be commended for his boundless optimism as well as his productivity.
While the show is mildly entertaining and the actors are reasonably decent in their performances, the whole thing has a hint of slapstick to it.
Further, as the individual scenes are alternated with short musical interludes, consisting of singing and dancing, I’d suspect the show would be found more agreeable by an African audience, the more sad there’s such little interest in performing arts, here.

The play’s about some wheeling and dealing at a small office, where an important employee is fired by the boss, then tries to win his position back.

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