:: louder than swahili

Tarzan lives in Ta(R)zania?

Nothing like going through your collection of business cards after a night out.

This one is a diamond.

Latest news on the Sauti za Busara

Sauti za Busara is coming up.

Last week I participated in the festival's press conference in Dar es Salaam (and admittedly, really happy to see that one of my photos from last year has made it to the backpage of this year's programme). This year I'll be blogging again, sharing my personal inputs from the festival in words and photography.

To me the Sauti za Busara is one of the most important events on the Swahili Coast, and in Tanzania, because it is an excellent example of East Africa's potential.

However, I have noticed that the people I know in Dar es Salaam split in two groups. The ones who wouldn't dream of missing the festival and who have planned long in advance to go; - and then the ones who think that the infamous power cut on Zanzibar makes it all impossible.

Obviously, it is not good. But the people of Zanzibar make it work. Everyday. So can we. I see no other option than to go, but to follow the advice coming from Busara here:

Bring torches and batteries or if possible alternative energy torch i.e. solar or kinetic energy, and if possible donate them to the Busara buddies, a walking taxi service who will be escorting guests back to their hotels around Stone Town.

Bring cash (the ATMs don't work well with no power); I know it isn't the best advice - but people are queing in long lines in Stone Town at the ATMs - so, don't bring more than you need or tempt destiny.

Practically, you'll also make it easier on yourself to buy a return ticket in Dar.

Follow Sauti za Busara on Facebook here for updates of sign up for the newsletter here.

Dar Sketches: A whole new way of looking at Dar es Salaam

I'm honoured to be included in this new intiative: Dar Sketches, which might eventually turn into a book.

My post WORKING FOR CHANGE (THE SMALL CHANGE WHICH MAKES DAR ES SALAAM MOVE) made in onto the blog here.

A whole new way of looking at Dar es Salaam.

Photography: Calm corner of a market place somewhere in northern Tanzania

Slacktivist. Are you one of them?

 
I found a new word: Slacktivism - formed out of the words slacker and activism. The word is, according to the Wikipedia, considered a pejorative term that describes "feel-good" measures, in support of an issue or social cause, that have little or no practical effect other than to make the person doing it feel satisfaction. The acts also tend to require little personal effort from the slacktivist.

Of course, the funniest thing, personally, to me is that I once lived with a South African 'Slack', who's family are nicknamed the 'Slackers'.

But even better:

'Slacktivism is an apt term to describe feel-good online activism that has zero political or social impact. It gives those who participate in "slacktivist" campaigns an illusion of having a meaningful impact on the world without demanding anything more than joining a Facebook group. Remember that online petition that you signed and forwarded to your entire contacts list? That was probably an act of slacktivism...' according to Evgeny Morozov.

Examples of activities labeled as "slacktivist" include signing internet petitions, the wearing of wristbands ("awareness bracelets") with political messages, putting a ribbon magnet on a vehicle, joining a Facebook group, posting issue-oriented YouTube videos, altering one's personal data or avatar on social network services, or taking part in short-term boycotts such as Buy Nothing Day or Earth Hour, the Wikipedia defines.

I just realised that this is all I hate the most about working for an NGO, that we constantly impose a heavy load of slacktivist activities on people when we appeal to their wallets and conscience (and that the only reason I contribute in such slacktivist activities is to get hits on my blog or to investigate the phenomenon deeper - because it is part of my job).

Because, I really, really don't believe in being a slacktivist myself or in encouraging others to become so. Mainly because it is boring and passive, and you will never really change anything from that position, only retrieve compensation for your bad conscience for not being out there.

Or maybe I'm wrong?

Evgeny Morozov says 'Of course, the ideal case here is when one's participation in digital activism doesn't subtract from -- and instead enhances -- one's eagerness to participate in real-life campaigns. However, it's also quite possible that a significant portion of the activist population would be morally content with the "slacktivist" option alone, preferring not to get too close to more dangerous activities that are likely to get them in trouble with authorities. So should we be more careful when discussing the success of most digital activism campaigns, since they may also have unanticipated adverse effects on more effective forms of enacting political and social change? (Of course, the relative effectiveness of one type of activism over another is a matter of great contention too.)'

However, I am left with the questions:

• What is wrong with NGOs fostering slacktivists? Isn't it contraditory? And where's the limit?
• Are the NGOs considering the consequences of slacktivism (the adverse effects)?
• Are the NGOs aware of the fine line between making money, following trends and people taking charge in real life (and not from the couch or in cyberspace?)
• Do the NGOs realise that this is becoming conventional; that NGOs detour from what was original agendas, and have been directed by the silent majority who never want to go to the streets, but are still sufficiently aware to feed their conscience?

A friend of mine commented last night on Facebook when I linked to the Slacktivism on Wikipedia:

Slacktivism is close to lack-tivism, and the self-defeating German school of Ach!-tivism. Or how about on-cracktivism. Not to mention the hijacktivism of 9/11. Blackjacktivism in Las Vegas. And someone might just start a chapter of Slacktivista.

Activism comes in many variations.

Photography: Toilet Gender Indicator

Somehow my first impression was that an mzungu female must have been the original inspiration for this toilet gender indicator found on the door to the women's toilets at the District Commisioner's Office in Kilwa.

Ashimba and his band are doing rehearsals at 41 Records/ Dar es Salaam

Ashimba and his band are doing rehearsals at 41 Records before their show this Thursday the 28th of January at Alliance Francaise, Dar es Salaam. Rehearsals  

Predictions from the Mikocheni Report

Elsie at The Mikocheni Report reflected over why the Noughties were interesting, and she also did a little predicting of what's going to happen in Tanzania (mainly) during 2010. It is good stuff, go and check it out here.

My favorites are:

'Oysterbay Beach was called Oysterbay Beach before it was re-branded Coco, and there were no plastic chairs if you didn't bring your own.'

 

(I always wondered what was what. Coco or Oyster?)

and

 

'Jakaya Kikwete will be voted President in 2010. Again. But not with 80% of the vote...this time we might pretend to be sane and give him only a 75% landslide victory.'

(That's an easy one).

Umas(i)kini Sikitu

Poverty is nothing.

Please correct me if this is not a correct translation. And please, do also get back to me with ideas for interpretating it.

The photo is taken in the village at Kilwa Ruins.

 

Shelaton. As in 'are you here for the next erection?'

Working for change (the small change which makes Dar es Salaam move)

Hamna changi!

I bet you've heard that line many times if you have been to Tanzania.

Lakini, I know where the Tanzanian small change is.

On Kawawa Road, as on many other big roads in Dar es Salaam, it is a business to sell change to the conductors of the daladalas. A stack of coins might be 500 or 1000 Tanzanian shillings, which is sold for 500 and 1000 shillings + 50-100 shillings in extra charge. The conductors are then able to give change to the millions of passengers which every day pack themselves into a crowded daladala once, twice or thrice a day, every working day of the week.

How not to wear your vitenge

I get a lot of hits on my blog from the American Parlour Magazine, when they linked to my Obama kanga blog post here: 'Crazy about Obama: Hongera Barack Obama!'  from their article here.

First I want to say that I really appreciate that others link to and use my blog posts in this way. It makes so much more sense when I spend time to write them.

Secondly, I don't know Victoria Rowell, but I'm leaning towards supporting the people telling her off for not having fixed her kitenge properly. 

What she is wearing is not a kanga, it is more similar to a piece of kitenge. Vitenge - in pluralis - is not something you wrap around your body in spite Obama is there with you. Tailoring your vitenge into dresses is an art, and variations come in plenty around here. If you have money that's what you do.

The same thing goes for the endless amount of wazungu volunteers who upon arrival in Africa buy vitenge, kangas and kikois which they wrap around, probably thinking they're adjusting somehow. But as well as you don't walk on the red carpet - you also don't walk into an office in Dar es Salaam in a kikoi, unseamed kitenge or kanga (says the woman who brought a sewing machine all the way from Denmark to Africa).

Ubuntu, African belief-systems and inherent interconnectedness

Here we say tuko pamoja, in South Africa they say “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu [a person is a person through other persons, or I am because we are]”.

Find here a very well-written piece on ubuntu, African belief-systems and inherent interconnectedness. 

 

Ashimba Live in Dar es Salaam

 
Event: Ashimba Live
What: Concert
Start Time: 28 January at 20:00
End Time: 28 January at 23:00
Where: Alliance Francaise, Dar es Salaam

Check it out here.

Bono on Twaweza

Did you see this?

In the New York Times Bono includes the Tanzanian NGO Twaweza on his Top-10 list for the future:

...'Today, the weight bears down harder when the few are corrupt or fail to deliver on the promises that earned them authority in the first place.

The world is taking notice of this change. On her most recent trip to Africa, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton bypassed officials and met instead with representatives of independent, nongovernmental groups, which are quickly becoming more organized and more interconnected. For example, Twaweza, a citizen’s organization, is spreading across East Africa, helping people hold local officials accountable for managing budgets and delivering services. (Twaweza is Swahili for “we can make it happen.”)'

What to say? If Bono ever knew how hard I once tried to get hold of him.

Impressions from the Dar es Salaam Nightlife

'Where to go out in Dar es Salaam?' some people ask.

It’s a very good question, and I have absolutely no sensible advice, except; ‘Don’t bring people into it if they want to nurse a romantic image of Tanzania, and ‘please, leave your car at home.’

The question is among the relativities hard to answer correctly as it all depends on how you define nightlife; your level of tolerance in regards of old, male wazungu picking up young malaya; and how far you wanna ride in a taxi.

One thing is certain: the nightlife scene in Dar es Salaam has a logic and a life cycle of its own, and in my head it sometimes resembles this scene from Star Wars, where Han Solo accepts a charter to transport Luke Skywalker & co to Alderaan. In Dar, it is on occasion also hard to picture that the people are actually having real, normal lives during day light.

'Let's go to Q-Bar', I usually suggest. There's always someone hearing it as 'Cuba', and there's always someone who wants to know what kind of bar that is. 'It's sort of like Al's Bar in Kampala. A bit like Amigo Bar in Copenhagen. Sort of like the boats in Belgrade where they play turbo-folk and men wear guns under their leatherjackets,' I try.

Sawa. We go to ‘Q-bar’.

When we arrived there last Friday evening after 20 the drink of the day was written in chalk on the bar list: ‘Dirty Girl Scout Shots’. Maybe an open invitation to the people with the ability to live multiple lives and forget about the other life when they're in Q-Bar?

Take for instance the two wazungu males entering cautiously; both dressed in clothes resembling the wear Danish wives buy for their middle-aged spouses on the summer sale. The older guy rocking his foot to the beat of the band now playing a tune from a period of time he looks as if he’s wishing he was still living in. But, hey, up walks this young woman, lathering her arms rounds around him, conveniently confirming him, that he still has it.

And maybe he has?

What do I know?

I always reach my limit when this installation of intimacy occurs in front of my eyes.

I always wonder what happens in those men’s heads. The white, the black and the yellow – in Q-Bar it is all the same. Will they suppress the fact that the malaya only does it for the money she desperately needs? I mean, you got to be bloody desperate to sleep with the loud bunch of Chinese males who were drooling in the left corner of the range of my eyesight.

We never made it in to Garden Bistro at the tip of the Peninsula, though we tried to. Moving around Dar es Salaam nightlife four people is a mission of compromises. When we arrived, women in flip flops and one man in short trousers, the man was rejected as if Tanzania suddenly overnight had decided to follow all international conventions. Our suggestion to let him exchange his shorts with one of my friend’s pair of jeans was rejected with a: ‘Please, go home and do so, if you must. And then you come back.’

In Garden Bistro, men cannot wear shorts (but women can wear close to nothing). The management of Garden Bistro apparently lives in a bubble of their own, believing that when men wear long trousers Garden Bistro goes respectable?

Fascinating. Projecting facts of life is a recurrent theme in the Dar es Salaam nightlife.

Alafu.

We then headed off to the Irish Bar instead, where there are less malaya, but everyone is high on good old-fashioned European aggression, radiating from the left overs trying to combine what others threw away.

Here we faced the Maasai askari, three Somali guys in Palestine scarfs, a mad mzungu presumably on chemicals, and a Kiwi pilot who said: ‘I’m gonna show you what I miss the most’.

I wanted to have answered 'normality' or 'to use my brain', but I have decided this year to be less kali. Besides, at that point I already knew that he was referring to his tattoo of his motherland going from his left underarm to his waistline (because here rumors travel fast).

I don't know how these other people manage to navigate between nightlife and day in Dar es Salaam, me, it leaves with a collection of funny moments, less illusions and heavy hangovers.

Today's Quote: Karen Blixen

'Here I am where I ought to be.'

Karen Blixen 

But hey, where was she (sort of geographically) when she came up with that quote?

Africa?

Denmark?

 

Born to suffer

 
From the back of a pick up parked at the Ugandan border to Sudan.

(Revisiting my photos from Uganda).

Where things are simple: Get a lover!

The photo is from a street in central Kampala.

Posho & Promises. All for a better life

The coming elections in October are already stirring up the media and people's minds. It is even changing the landscape: Schools are getting additional classrooms and villages water wells. Sometimes even tarmac if you live close to a politician.  

It is a wideknown secret that Tanzanian politicians hold back funds for last minute development because the human memory is short. The argument is that the constituencies will not be able to remember what their politicians did for them if it isn't close up the election and if it isn't things which has a direct influence on your everyday life.

It is interesting psychology: If you can feel the change physically you might vote accordingly.

But sometimes enhanched appreciation is necessary to improve this impact of this psychology.

In spite, the 'takrima' - election hand-outs - was banned in 2006, it is no secret that there are other ways to treat your voters nicely. You can arrange 'meetings' or 'celebrations' where your (potential) voters are offered posho usafiri (travel allowance), posho chakula (food allowance) and posho mkutano (sitting allowance) - but also soap, t-shirts, kangas or kanda mbili (flip flops) are nice treats.

The merchandise is maybe not unusual in an international context, Danish political parties also use merchandise, but in a Tanzanian village it might be your best t-shirt or your best kanga up till next election, where you'll then be wearing the presidents portrait on your body as a daily reminder of your government's guarantee for 'Maisha bora kwa kila Mtanzania' - a better life for every single Tanzanian.

In case you forget who you voted for last time and what they promised you then. I wonder why this psychology doesn't work the other way round?

The first photo is from November 2007 and taken at a sisal plantation in Korogwe. The second from Dar es Salaam, promoting CCM.

Tuning into Europe. Africa will make it without us

I'm not the only one returning to Europe soon. I have two other good, European friends who are going through the same existential crisis of preparing to transfer in not so long.

Therefore, a lot of our conversations are dealing with what will be of Europe and what will be of us upon return.

Somehow, it appears, we’re certain that Africa will make it without us.

Honestly, we're more worried about Europe, ourselves and our ability to re-integrate in a location where there are less than 26 degrees; nobody being uswahili about anything; where mobiles are sim-locked; people drive accordingly to signs and the designated lanes; where your friends will check their calendar before they agree to have coffee with you ('eh, next week or what about next month?'); and where the colour of your couch can make up enough material for a typical, average conversation.

Lakini, you know; it’s better to go home while this is still good.

Besides, I also tend to forget that back home there used to less amoeba infections; no malaria; no dinner conversations where it seems perfectly okay to talk about stomac infections in details; high speed Internet for less money, rye bread; European rock music; a million different kinds of dairy products to choose from on the supermarket shelves; friends and family. And yesterday my friend predicted that in our absence the type of men who brush their teeth with a daily frequency have multiplied. 

I keep my expectations practical when it comes to Europe.

Check out Ashimba's first music video: 'Yaya' (Ashimba feat. Nakaaya)

Really cool song by Ashimba produced by Maisha Music.

Now, check oout Ashimba's first music video, shot in March 2009 from the album "Nuru Nyikani" by Maisha Music.

Produced by Real2Reel Film Productions. Directed and edited by Nassos Chatzopoulos  

The Marlboro Man (in a Danish volunteer way)

Yesterday I took an extra look at my book shelf in the office and found this book:

It is called ‘Frivillig og Fremmedarbejder’ a title which can be translated into English as ‘Volunteer and Emmigrant Worker’. The book is revising the personnel programme of the NGO I work for.

20 years ago. The book is from 1988.

I brought the book home to share it with the variety of people who live here at the moment.

The photos are fantastic.

Like this one of a smoking, female, Danish plumber.

Or the volunteer wearing a bikini on the beach in Zanzibar, the caption explaining it is a great way to make contact with locals.

But the three women of us all had one favourite. This man.

 
The caption says he’s a farmer from the northern part of Jutland who volunteered in Kimuli in Tanzania in the early days of the programme, which must have been the 1960ties

He looks as if he hasn’t showered or shaved recently, he’s wearing sandals of old car tyres and his clothes are worn out. He’s smoking, too. He’s into music.

Generally, he looks as if he’s really into what’s he’s doing.

A bit like a Marlboro Man but in a Danish volunteer way.

Not many of his kind around any more, I’m afraid.

We'd really like to have known this one.

Dancing (the African way)

Great response here at The Long Gone Daddy to my blog post the other day on when wazungu are made to dance the African way.

Respect. Kabisa.

Malawian logic or Tanzanian fiction?

I have a full house at the moment, which appears to be a natural source of a million misunderstandings between the three askari and my house keeper, who desperately try to keep track of the wazungu coming and going.

One of them is here to do some research, and while preparing for his field work, he's taking a language course.

The other day he had to interview a person for homework, and I suggested he interviewed my askari, Governor.

Later I curiously asked my friend what Governor had told him, and out came this story about Governor being a Chagga from Moshi. I wondered, and felt slightly embarrased as for over two years I'd thought Governor was Malawian.

'No, no' my friend said. 'He said he's a Chagga from Moshi.'

I had to ask Governor what had happened in those years I'd known him. How he'd suddenly transformed to a Chagga? Governor smiled and gave the perfect explanation: 'Haya, I can't tell your friend that I'm a Malawian when he interviews me for his homework. Then I must be Tanzanian.'

Better get the fiction right before the research starts.

Icelandic Tree Hugger

A little bit funny when you normally live in a country with no trees of real significance (some will say the same thing counts for the national finances).
  

2010 Sauti za Busara, 11 - 16 February 2010 in Stone Town

The 7th. My third.

Check out the programme here, and all my previous blog posts on Sauti za Buusara here.

See you?

The Free & Silent African Revenge

Have you ever watched wazungu being forced to dance the African way?

I don't mean forced physically, but psychologically. From where, we the wazungu come from (at least the ones who work for the NGOs), we have been told to be culturally sensitive, to integrate and to do whatever the locals do.

In some cases that involves dancing.

Certain wazungu can't wait for it to happen (personally I need Konyagi to fall in that group) - other times we almost fall sick because we can see what is lined up and expected of us.

I was once present at a reception party where an mzungu director were to be given presents. He was placed in the centre of an open square. Then the national staff began to dance towards him in a line. He now looked as if he was the man of thousand faces, not the man who used to obtain the supposedly highest and most respectable position in the office.

As an mzungu, even many years in Africa, in a situation like this you are left on your own to contemplate in clear view of all people present:

Should I dance? Should I stand still? What should I do with my hands? Not to forget my hips? How the hell do they shake their asses? When will it stop?

It is - in an mzungu way of thinking - a horrendous way of humiliating another person (even better if there are other wazungu present, as they will remind that particular person about this ever after). Similar to this one and this, though these often don't take place in public.

In my opinion it is better to pretend you can dance in spite you can't. I have realised that the mzungu who freaks out will suffer the most. It somehow appears to add on to the entertainment, which by the way is live, free and better than Animal Planet. Besides, I guess, it is a bit about showing interest and effort - and ironically what makes you ridiculous in Europe might not have the same impact here.

The thing is, it is not only about dancing (though that is the thing I personally struggle the most with);

Africans are, in my opinion, generally masters of persevering, waiting, patience, acceptance and saying nothing. When the white woman gives up, panicks and gets kali - she has lost her case. An mzungu who cannot set him/herself free from his/her conventions has lost. An mzungu who focuses on all the stuff her or she doesn't get, has lost. In general; an mzungu who only takes the good parts, but does not embrace the kali parts of his/her life in Africa, is fucked. - Meaning you can be rather talented at mixing Pink Gins while looking at the sun set, but if you can't do the dance thing, you are really not that cool. 

To me the making-the-wazungu-dance example is the best one, as it will make any mzungu feel the difference of being on top to not. And that's the 'The Free & Silent African Revenge' in a nut shell.

You might as well get up and dance (thank god for the Spirit of the Nation)!

I'm amazed

You know I told you about my fascination for Johnny Clegg, (and the fact that fortunately I came to Africa first on my own initiative, not due to a contract. That came later.)

The day before yesterday I picked up my family at the Zanzibar boats at the Kivukoni Sea Front in Dar es Salaam. I stuff the 7-year old Icelandic in on the backseat, recovering from seasickness. Nevertheless, he goes; 'Play that song with na na na na na na na na na na Africa!'

Apparently I've played it a lot, enough for him to pick up words and the rhytm. Back home I had to copy the CD to him. The first, original version by Juluka.

'How do you explain the lyrics of Scatterlings of Africa to a 7-year old Icelandic?', my sister later asked from their hotel room in London.

Next time.

At your own risk

When you park around here it says 'at your own risk'.

At the swimming pool or play ground it is the same.

Maybe the Tanzanian authorities ought to put up an 'Entrance at your own risk' at the border?
 

Fear & Loathing in Kigamboni

 

Saturday night we did run out of drinks eventually, and as the restlessness appears to be high these days, we needed to go somewhere on the Kigamboni side of the harbour.

Over the open land, across the road, and uphill to one of these classic bars which are genrously strewn along the Swahili coast.

However, Kigamboni has - for some reason - a touch of some uncompromising Wild West. Us, the four wazungu, got a welcome the Danish Peple's Party would have been proud of.

I believe a lot of guidebooks on Tanzania would be rewritten had the writers spent more time in bars like these.

Weather Forecast for Dar es Salaam: Rain (even on the vitenge in Uhuru Street)

This December/January it has been raining in Kilwa, Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam. Basically everywhere I went.

Climate change? It isn't supposed to rain like this at this time on the Swahili coast.

Ironically, the vitenge with the rain motives were all over on display in Uhuru Street last week.

Conspiracy? I'm beginning to think so (it is siku kuu tomorrow, so of course it will be raining).

Check the weather forecast here.  

Photography: Stone Town. Unguja.

 
 
    
 

'I don't understand the Tanzanians'

Why is everything polepole?

Is it because of the ujamaa?

Why do they accept this crazy corruption?

Why don't they do something?

When I was in Kenya/South Africa/Zimbabwe/Uganda there was so much more drive.

Sometimes I'm being cornered by an mzungu, who (in my opinion) is caught in a desperate process of projecting the facts that he/she needs reasoning for his/her existence in Africa.

In stead of questioning our own short comings (our inability to speak the local language, our lack of patience and time to get into a completely different culture or our unwillingness to live on similar conditions like the majority of the Africans), we distribute some of the above questions.

Often, I go along, and together we can make up an even longer list. If you work for an NGO the need is a bit more tangible as you need visible impact to reply back to the donors (but also to legitimise the money you deal with).

But even the capitalists, and the men looking for easy women, need it.

Wazungu want explanations. But, I believe, we make up the list in vain.

I've learnt two things: 

One thing - it is all about psychology; It is extremely painful to be an expat, hired on a contract which provides you with a huge responsibility, new title, contract, job, house, insurance, 4WD and resettlement allowance - admitting your own shortcomings when you're already in it (I'm soon out, which means that I'm convincing myself it is easier to write this).

Secondly, 10 years ago in Serbia, I also learnt this (but almost forgot it): it is so much easier if you don't try to understand e-ve-ry-thing all the time. In Serbia it made it so much more easy for me to get to know people by accepting that parts would probably always only be a mystery.

Some things are not even supposed to be understood.

Please, light up my soup, so that I don't eat the flying ants...

Another important moment from our safari to Selous.

Baltasar brought the right equipment; a small torch, when the ants attracted by the light from the kerosene lamps joined us for dinner.

What else can you do?

Should I bring my child on a safari in Africa...?

We brought this one, a 7-year old Icelandic, with a fine record of previous visits to East Africa, but no specific safari experience.

These photos are actually not answering my question; the boy absolutely loved it, and stood up for the most of seven hour long game drive, looking out of the roof in the rebuilt Defender. Then he engaged with the crew in Hippo Camp, teaching him Kiswahili phrases and letting him move behind the bar.

He only had a crisis once; when we had to wait for a sleeping lion couple to wake up.

Well, and then the one on the photos here, taken after lunch, which I, however, doubt was safari related, but rather a pre-puberty rant at his aunt...

Back from a short hiatus (where I lost inspiration)

After I returned from South Africa on December 20I kind of got lost between a house full of wonderfull - and long awaited - guests coming and going; a Christmas Eve party in Dar es Salaam; a quick drive through the mud to Kilwa; a safari to Selous and a boat trip to a rainy Unguja (which by the way has no electricity).

I basically felt that I ran out of inspiration, which might be related to the fact that my subconsciousness is trying hard to tell my brain to get ready for returning back to Europe.

You might not believe me, but it is so much more comlicated returning home, than it is to make the decision to go and work and live in Africa. When you leave for Africa, you have a mission, a job, house, insurance and transport -  they even give you a preparation course and an attempt to explain how the Danish tax system works.

When you go back, you're on you're own.

I tried to explain some of these contemplations to my Icelandic family who themselves have moved forth and back between Denmark and Iceland a couple of times. My 7-year old nephew overheard the conversation, and later he returned to me to elaborate on the fact that he had interpretated my statements as 'starting from scratch' to 'moving back to your parents' house, doing primary school all over'.

At that point it all got really scary. It is complex, but not that difficult.

I even think the inspiration is returning.

Locating the Big Dipper

Everything is the other way round when you normally live in Iceland.

My company last night on an island in Rufiji River was trying to locate the stars, which there were millions of.

Wildlife conversation with a 7-year old

Baltasar: What are they doing?

Me: They are mating?

Baltasar: What is that?

Me: They are having sex, I think. Probably trying to make children.

Baltasar: Are they in love?

Me: I hope so. It looks complicated.