Today felt like a real turning point. Up early at Herbs & Spices Ethiopian Restaurant and Guest House in Arusha. We wanted to reach Nanyogie around lunch for performing seven test interviews: Two at the school, one at the dispensary, and four in the Maasai community.
Approaching Moshi we were lucky again with sightings; Kilimanjaro in full glory rising above the clouds. Snow on top. After being stopped and released by police controls a number of times Rafael tells me that I am an African now!
-Jambo!!! Nice to see you! How are you! Glad you are here! Oh, we are going to Mombo today! Yes, thank you!
Smiles, handshakes and happy faces takes you a long way here in Tanzania.
At around noon we reach Bwiko, where we turn off the road to drive the bush road 16 km to Nanyogie. Two Norwegian nursing students and the young warrior Mussa awaits us to join this trip, thus saving themselves a four hour walk.
It is to Bwiko the people of Nanyogie have to walk or ride the bicycle to charge their phones.
- No more four hour walk to Bwiko – and four hour back if we have the Higlight!!
Simon, the young teacher is almost ecstatic by the thought, when being interviewed by Kristina as she and Linda are doing the follow up test interviews after the 10 days of use! He continues
- This is so great! We have used it every night for reading, and we have been able to charge our phones! If we had this at school we could borrow it out to school children if they need to do homework.
Linda is interviewing Maria, Daniel, Martin with help of Rafael. For them this technology is also a revolution. Maria already had started to charge phones for 200 tzs each. For Linda this was also a great thing as she has children for evening classes. They all have been very serious filling out test protocols, and have been using the product extensively!
I walk around with my friend Jacobo, who I met already in 2007 when I was here for the first time. It was not until the third time I was here that I found out that he speaks really good English! We walk down to the school and meet the head teacher, who I also know since the first time I was here. I get an idea and bring up my computer to check if we can connect to internet. The Zantel network is not live here, but the Vodacom network has really improved and we have a full reading on network strength. I try to connect using my Samsung Galaxy as mobile access point , and voila – it works!
So 16 km from the nearest electricity outlet we have a good internet connection here! A used netbook computer, a USB Internet stick from Vodacom, and the possibility to charge the computer would actually give the school internet access! This was not possible two years ago!
So we get more ideas to feed to Rafaels and mine project idea around "Off Grid Community Development" .
We could not stay in Nanyogie tonight, as we had to go to Maweni Farm for our nest test interview. So here I am here at this wonderful spot up in the Usambara Mountains. And the food is definitely the best in this part of Africa. Go here if you can! Good night!
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