Now finally some details about my VSO placement. My main objective centres around the Fema TV Talk Show. This is a weekly 30min format running for 28 weeks a year (depending on funding) and on-air since 2002. The previous season it went out 5 times a week including primetime on the 2 biggest stations, TBC1 (public broadcaster) and ITV (commercial). The show centres about a different topic each week, not just HIV/AIDS related, but healthy lifestyles in a wider perspective incl. life skills, education, environment and so on. Most of the shows are studio based, but some discussions are being [View Full Entry]

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Television is still a pretty new medium in Tanzania, it’s only been going for about 10 years, and therefore it’s still in its infancy. Distribution is pretty good despite the lack of electricity in many parts of the country with generator powered community viewing in the more remote places and classic family viewing (like it used to be in the Western world, when there was only one TV in the household) in the more developed and affluent areas. This means even if you target a TV programme at a specific audience, it’s still quite likely to be watched by a wider [View Full Entry]

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I’m so happy I've got my bicycle now, so not feeling restricted anymore. I’ve been riding to work all week already, so no more useless time spent in traffic jams! It’s perfect for exploring town as well, the heat becomes slightly less overbearing when cycling than even walking slowly and I get a lot less hassle as well, no more ‘Taxi, taxi - rafiki , hey taxi!’… It’s not more scary than cycling in London, bus and cab drivers are pretty much as reckless in any city and there are about as few cycle lanes as in London as well, just [View Full Entry]

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The old guy, Hamisi (which means Thursday in Swahili - people are often called after the day the are born or some event that took place at the time) who helped us with getting it to the house, said, he’s fixing it. He explained the starter must have got rusty while the car was at sea. So he said, once it’s cleaned and the battery recharged, it should all be fine. So he came back the day after, last Saturday, only a mere 3 hours later than promised (and just in time when I had try to get a different mechanic [View Full Entry]

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On Thursday morning I heard, they towed the car out from the port - they found the keys, but didn't manage to jump-start it. Now it was parked on the street near my clearing agents office... My boss wasn't very happy about me missing any more time of the training to pick it up, but offered to get our drivers to collect it from there and get it to the secure office car park, so I agreed to that. After some more phone calls it turned out, they couldn't find the key-fob for the immobiliser! This was a new worry, especially [View Full Entry]

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As I mentioned, I was supposed to have been on this sexuality training all week, but already ended up travelling from Kunduchi on the North beach twice into town, missing 2 half days. But didn't want to leave the car any longer in the port, as I had to pay port fees for every day it is parked there and it's been in there by far too long already! Also, I can’t start with the road licence registration process until the car is out of the port. So I first went on Monday afternoon, when I had to identify the car [View Full Entry]

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Very nice to be back at Kunduchi Hotel going for a swim in the morning just after sunrise and before it gets hot, wonderful. The workshop started quite alright as well, with participants from South Africa, Mozambique, Uganda, Swaziland, Lesotho, Ethiopia, Namibia and some Tanzanians from other organisations and a couple of other Femina people, it’s a very interesting mix. Our sexologist is quite different to what I had envisaged - I guess my view was slightly influenced by those dodgy 1970s soft-core films that ran on the commercial German TV channels late at night… The training i [View Full Entry]

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The last couple of weeks we had a Norwegian student, Maggie, staying with us. She is doing a course at a small Norwegian college, that has got outposts on various beach resorts around the world (I’m not kidding!). Besides Bali, there is one on Zanzibar and after studying there for a few months, they have to go to a local organisation for a couple of weeks and write a report about it. So Maggie came to Femina and stayed with us in the house, which was a nice addition. She's leaving to go back to her university on Zanzibar today. Now [View Full Entry]

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Time for another update on this - the port of Dar Es Salaam struggles keeping up with the amount of ships coming in, so there is a 2 week delay for them to unload, hence you can see lots of big vessels anchored in the bay. This applied to ‘Karijn’ with my car on it as well and Roselyn, my clearing agent told me, they cannot start the clearing process until the vessel has docked in the port. At least I was in Dar now and could take all the documents to her office and they wanted a fair amount of [View Full Entry]

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Dar is a strange kind of bubble, you somehow fall into thinking, you are living in a big modern city, but then there are some things that bring it back to you, that this is the developing world and not quite everything has developed yet: Even some of the main roads aren’t tarmaced and have got pot holes big enough to fit a small car in, which transform into little lakes after a rainfall, which again causes even bigger traffic jams. Then there are the occasional power cuts, with whole districts of the city being pitch black for hours or the [View Full Entry]

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