The African Life

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The African Life

Hello!
We’re getting close to our finish of the field work now. Actually our last day is going to be on Friday, and on Saturday we are heading off on a Safari! Three days and three national parks in the area. Lake Manyara, Tangariki and Ngorongoro National parks. After that I’m jumping on a bus on Tuesday to Nairobi.

Anyway, the last week has been quit nice. We have moved to Marangu now, and we are living in a big house with a couple of German nurses and a Finish dentist. As I said earlier in a blog, the climate up here is good, but it’s still really warm around midday.
The first time we came for a day trip to Marangu we didn’t like it at all, but now, I think we have all fallen in love with the place. Lena is actually going to move here she say’s…
We have spent the last week meeting a Norwegian lady that lives here, we’ve had some walks around interviewing local people, talked to some contacts we got from Norwegian friends and just been observing how the life is here in Marangu.


A few points we have been thinking about the last weeks (and maybe got some inspirasjon to think about from interview objects);

• One way to get out of poverty for many people around would probably be to engage in something! For Tanzania in general for example, they are used to get loads of support directly on their budget. And maybe they get a bit lacy to find way’s to be self sufficient. We can see the same on the local plan; People don’t want to do anything unless they get something for it. If they don’t work they tend to drink. The local village looks like shit, but nobody seems to care. Maybe if they start engage in small things, they can get new ideas and inspiration to think bigger and about the future.
A local joke in Marangu goes like this;
Porters are having a beer and celebrating after finishing a trip to Mt. Kilimanjaro. After a couple of beers their having a look out and towards the mountain and someone are asking “Is the mountain still there?” Yes, the other answers. The first one again: “Good, let’s have another round of beer!”
This is a pretty god indication of how many of the people think here! They don’t think about their future…

• Tanzania is full of corruption! Another way to change things would definitely be to stop all this. The problem is that it is everywhere. So if you want to change it you have to change the attitude of a whole group of people. Even the church here is corrupt! (maybe not a big surprise…)

• One thing we already can see from our study is that the tourism mainly benefits the people that work with it. If we go just a little bit away from the tourist access roads or gates to the parks, not many can feel the tourism in their life…

• It’s amazing how much you can communicate with people without speaking the language. Especially our neighbour kids… We’ve been playing with them a lot now, and they are pretty enthusiastic every time we see them! Of course I wish I could speak Swahili, but with kids it’s working ok without.

• About 80 % of the kids around here are pretty rude I would say. The only sentence they can say in English is: Give me my pen! Or; Give me chocolate! And it doesn’t help when tourist do what they ask for and give it to them!! Stop doing that!!
It doesn’t help what I wrote in the first point, that the people around should engage more to help themselves out of poverty. Begging is not the right way!

• When it first rains down here it’s hammering down!! (at the moment…)

• Norway and other country’s that are helping developing countries with money and project support should start to follow the money more close. A lot of the money that have been given to Tanzania and marked with certain projects hasn’t even started, and the money is gone. It’s a road here in Marangu towards the Kenyan border that the government got 20 million Nkr to pave many years ago, and they never did it. And where’s the money now??!!?

• Its loads of examples of misuse of money in this country, so how is it in less peaceful ones and more underdeveloped??


Ok, I’ll stop this for now. And don’t stop travelling or giving money to Red Cross, Norwegian Church Aid and other organisations, because they put their energy in to fight much of this, and many projects are successful.

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