Kwa heri dar es salaam

How time flies.
It's time to say good bye to dar.. in fact, I already have.

Now I'm sat in the lounge of dubai international airport.
Rather amazed by the level of civilisation here lol

But it was really hard to leave Dar es Salaam.
Reflecting on my 3 and a half months, it was like a roller coaster..
At the beginning, I was full of hope, so happy to be in Sub-Sahara Africa, the place I had been longing to visit. Then after that I was so frustrated - I couldn't "get" the town, culture or people. I think it was about half way through, in my 2nd month, I got through that frustration.

After that, time just flew past. I love Tanzania and dar es salaam, though I do get frustrated every now and then seeing problems that can be overcome.

Also job-wise, it was a valuable experience. I wouldn't say I know everything, but I can say I know more, a lot more than I did before. And although my work at the headquarter (dev partnership div) might be quite "far" from the field projects, I shall try to remember how I felt, things people said, and always relate my work to it. Tanzania will be at the core of my work, whatever level I will be working.

It's(was) sad to leave, but I hope I will come back.

Kwa heri Dar es Salaam, lakini tutaonana tena.

Collecting the ordinary sceneries

Oh dear. Almost 3 weeks without a post.
or more like, "has it already been 3 weeks since I sent to zanzibar??!"

This is scary, cuz I've only got 2 weeks left before going back to Tokyo!

My life started rolling properly about a month ago. Now I know what I'm doing, I know what is where in Dar, where to have fun, and I have a good company too. I suddenly found myself really enjoying my life.. when I've only got 3 weeks to go before relocation.

I'm gonna miss this place. what to do??

I started collecting photos of the favourite ordinary places around Dar.. normal scenery I've been seeing, but not necessarily having a record of. The bunch of photos below are from a casual walk around the town on saturday, but I will try to continue doing this till the day I leave...

Zanzibar revisited

The main post of the day today..

After the ramadhan break wkend, I immediately set off to another 6-day business trip this time to Mwanza, the 2nd biggest city of Tanzania.

Fast forward, I came back to Dar, my friend says "let's go to Zanzibar this weekend cuz we may not have time in October!"
True, we are running out of "weekends".

So we went. My 2nd visit to the paradise.

This time I managed to go to Prison Island, with massive turtoise and the most beautiful beach ever, and Nungui, a famous spot for diving.
Do I dive? again, no not really, but I did a Try Dive and it was fun. (I will use my paid holiday to go to Thailand or somewhere to get a lisence... I'm serious!)

Unfortunately there's no underwater picture, but let me show you how beautiful that place is...

...How could you not fall in love with this island?

Eid Mubarak

How time flies, it's been almost 2 weeks since my last lazy post!
Let me post two in a row to catch up...

What have I been up to?
The last post was on the 8th of September, just before Eid ul Fitr -the break of ramadhan.
Ramadhan traditionally ends when the new moon is sighted. While some countries just decides the date for the end of ramadhan, Tanzania takes a traditional method -the most important muslim person of Tanzania decides -ie, if he sights the new moon, that's the end of ramadhan. If he can't see the moon for whatever reason, another day of fasting. I was told that the break of ramadhan is often a day later than other countries. (Apparently this year Kenya was a day late!)

So, on the evening of Thursday the 9th we (ppl in my office) gathered on the office balcony, saw the moon and went home happily because it meant that Friday became a day off.
What did I do? well, cool people go to the beach for ramadhan break!


So I joined a bunch of ppl for surfing excursion to South Beach, just on the south of dar es salaam.
Do I surf? um, not really. But I like trying.
Well, even if I could -even those surfers I went there with were struggling to catch the wave, because the ocean was nice 'n' calm, perfect for light beach fun.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed floating on the board, paddling, using my unused mascles, having fun under the sun :)

Wonders of nature

A week passed writing up reports and doing all sorts of random work..

Here's a place I found in Lindi, the seaside town I stayed on the last night of the hospital trip.
Totally resembles ah-what's-it-called? The world heritage site in Cambodia (I believe) I'd love to visit but not yet managed to.

Lindi, just like Bagamoyo, also was one of the ports for slave trade in the 19th century, and there are a few historical, German colonial heritages in some parts of the town.

This building is not named as far as I know, and no one seems to care about it.
I was the only one standing there, staring and getting a strange shiver feeling the power of nature and "the past" of such a peaceful town.

Masai warriors

I just wanted to put this picture cuz it's funny...

Apparently there's no/not many Masai guys in Uganda (according to this guy who I met the other day), but in Tanzania you see them everywhere.. on streets, wearing Masai clothes.
It's really cool that they are sticking to their tradition in this era of globalisation and everything! Because of their world-famous reputation as warriors, the most common occupation (in Dar) is... Parking guard. Yea, I'm serious!

And the other weekend when I went to the South Beach in Dar... I found Masai lying on the beach.
Cute, no? :)

On visiting hospitals in Tanzania

It's been a while since I posted here.. I doubt people are following my posts so I was taking it easy.. um that's not true, I think I was a bit stuck.

Since I came back from my week-long business trip, I've been thinking what to post. Before I was just spontaneously coming up with stuff or I went to interesting places and it just triggered my thoughts and emotions. But it didn't happen. Why? I think I'm finally getting used to Tanzania; now, not everything seem so exotic like it did before... oh wait, does that tell you anything about my personality or personal life? ok let's stop lol

ANYWAY, it is both good and bad. But for the moment, this process of getting-used-to-the-new-things isn't completed yet, it seems. I was looking at the pictures from the business trip and I felt that I should share these photos with you (whoever may still be reading)!

Business trip No.?: Consultation Visits to 4 District Hospitals in South-Eastern region of Tanzania.

Ok, please don't generalise too much from my pictures, of course there are hospitals in city, but the places I visited look like this...Cool, huh?

But what the hell is Consultation Visit?
Well, we + Ministry of Health and Social Welfare of Tanzania are promoting this concept called 5S-KAIZEN-TQM (Total Quality Management) now in 21(? I think) hospitals, and it is planned to be disseminated to 37 hospitals across the country in the next 4 years.

5S-Kaizen is a management philosophy developed by Toyota, for quality improvement and continuous quality management. The S's are;
Seiri (Sort/Sasambua)
Seiton (Set/Seti)
Seiso (Shine/Safisha)
Seiketsu (Standardize/Sanifisha)
Shitsuke (Sustain/Shikilia)
(yes, it's all translated into English and Kiswahili!)

and "Kaizen(改善)" means something like "further improvement" in direct translation.

Why this?
Because this is what you see in these hospitals...






























I must say, these are seen everywhere I went, and I'm not exaggerating. Well, wards (the last one) look relatively okay -then again, maybe not? maybe I got used to it..

5S is such a simple and seemingly normal concept, yet it is not a norm here. It's not a straightforward thing to change someone's mindset, habit or culture. We all know that it could be dangerous, to impose one's habit to the other in some cases. However, on visiting these hospitals, I felt.. well, I hope this project will help, even slightly, to improve the quality of services for the well-being of these people.

A late-night thought on development partnership

Development Partnership is slowly but solidly becoming my speciality, and one of my personal task is to see how it works at the field level.

This matrix above, is a Division of Labour matrix of Development Partners (aid donors, basically.) in Tanzania.

What is it? Well, as you may know, there are sooo many agencies working in each developing country, hopefully to provide assistance towards the way the country wants to advance. If they didn't communicate at all, there will be overlaps and duplication of efforts, and that's basically annoying for the recipient country, and a pure waste of money for the assistance agencies. So in theory, development partnership aims to coordinate the efforts to maximise aid-effectiveness.

...and the DPs in Tanzania, a country renowned to be the best example of development partnership efforts, came up with the above matrix (and loads of other similar stuff).

Is this colourful matrix working nicely as it seems?

From what I've seen so far through several donor meetings that I attended, there was more conflict of interests than coordination in the donor community of Tanzania. Donor meetings are held, in theory to coordinate efforts and avoid duplications, but in reality it was more like each donor checking what others are doing, thinking what they are doing is the best.

If the information is shared but NOT USED to reduce excess efforts, to really co-assist respecting and listening to what Tanzania wants to do, then this "development partnership" is like putting the cart before the horse.

Unfortunately, it seems like that's the reality of that colourful matrix.. well, I'll continue my research, but if it is so, what can be done to promote the REAL development partnership...?

From tomorrow, I'm going away for a week-ish to visit hospitals in the South-Eastern region of TZ, to monitor implementation of quality control projects. I'll try to make the next one more interesting but next again may have to be pretty business-related. Pole (sorry)!

Amazing island called Zanzibar

Since last Thursday, there are a couple of friends from Warwick visiting Tanzania, and I had a chance to go to Zanzibar -a big-ish island off the coast of Dar es Salaam. Well, I kinda drugged them out of bed after a very heavy night out (not me sadly I had a bad migraine), but I think it was worth it!

My stay was actually quite short. We left Dar around 5pm on Saturday, on the smallest plane I've ever been on (probably not so so sooo small, but still it was cool), so I only had an evening and a Sunday to enjoy on the island.. but that was enough to make me fall in love with this island.

To those who like to know.. a short overview of Zanzibar.

Zanzibar is a fairly big, sometimes politically a little unstable island (Tanzania is a "united republic of" Tanzania and Zanzibar has its own parliament, president etc). Mainland of TZ used to be called Tanganyka and when it merged with Zanzibar in 1964, the country was re-named to be called TanZania :)

In the ooooold days, Zanzibar used to be a centre of trade between Africa (at least East Africa) and Middle East/Asia for centuries, and also was a main town of slave trade. So, although the religious composition on the mainland TZ is Christian 40% + Muslim 40% + other 20%, Zanzibar is under a much much stronger influence of Arabic culture.

Ah, gotta mention - Freddy Mercury was born in Zanzibar, moved out when he was still a kid though.

Well well, here are some pictures of Stone Town at night... unfortunately I couldn't spend enough time in Stone Town to take many good pictures.. but it's a good town to get lost, lots of very narrow, winding streets with exotic arabic door and lovely small shops... aw.


The last picture is the night food market - I don't know if it's there all-year-round, or if it's a special ramadan thing. There weren't too many variations of food, mostly food stalls of "zanzibar pizza" (kind of like galette.. I liked it very much), skewed meat/fish/other stuff or sugar cane juice.

Then on Sunday, we went up to the beach resort area in the Northern part of the island (about an hr+ drive away) and basically.. just chilled. What else can you do when you have such a beautiful beach and the sea in front of you??


Ok, from what I managed to do this weekend, it's hard to convince you all why I loved this island so much. But on top of lovely Stone Town and the amazing beach, there are other attractions like spice tour, swimming with dolphin, prison island (with lots of big turtles?), snorkeling, diving and so on (I'm pretty sure I'm missing something). I would happily do a biiiiig holiday on this island.

...But no, as I wasn't on holiday (unlike my friends I went there with), I had to take a night ferry (which was a 2nd-hand Japanese ship ie all the instructions and stuff were in Japanese) from Zanzibar to Dar.

Zanzibar, I'll be back.

Fascinated by the colours

What colour comes up in your mind when you think of Africa?

Well, there are so many colours here not to mention the red-ish brown of the sand, the blue of the sky & the sea, vast greenness of some rich countryside... but on top of those colours of beautiful nature, you see soooo many women in bright clothes.

I haven't quite managed to compile the photos of colourful ordinary people on the street, but I can't wait any longer to tell you the fascination of (East) African garments!

Here in Tanzania, among several, there are two popular kinds of garments: Kanga (sometimes spelt khanga) and Kitenge.

Kanga is -well, a picture is worth a thousand words- this.


It's about 1m by 1.5m, and usually sold in pair (um I'm not sure how to explain, when you buy, the cloth is actually 1m by 3m, with two prints, and you have to cut and trim the ends), for around $2-3.

And this is Kitenge. Typically 1m by 4m, around/less than $5.


See the difference?

While Kitenge is often used to make tailor-made clothes and those dresses are considered rather fashionable and maybe a bit formal (you see more women with these dresses on Sunday -when they go to church), Kanga is for ordinary use. It is most commonly wrapped around the skirt or around the head, but could be used as a baby carrier, table cloth, head-pad for heavy loads (when they carry things on their heads) and so on...

But you do see many women wrapping Kitenge around their skirts etc instead of Kanga too.

(The pic above: @Fish market, Mtwara)

Every Kanga has a Swahili saying -"jina" (name)- on one of the longer side. Can you see a bit of it on my purple Kanga (the 1st pic)?

Typical sayings are just like in any other culture - for example,
"MTAKA YOTE HUKOSA YOTE (One who wants all, usually loses all)"
"RADHI NI BORA KULIKO MALI (Blessings are better than possessions)"

I actually haven't quite properly decoded the sayings on my Kanga - that is one of the things I want to ask my kiswahili teacher tomorrow.. I'll follow up and put it in the comment below :)

My confession: At the western end of the town, there is a street known as "Kanga street" where you find many garment shops with thousands of different Kanga and Kitenge, and that has been my favourite spot (...for shopping). That was just inevitable!


PS To those who love trivial knowledge - "Kanga" actually is named -or came to be called- after Guinea foul (in kiswahili, kanga). This is because in the early days, the typical designs of Kanga was a border and a pattern of white spots on a dark background, just like the feathers of these birds!

A few words on agriculture

Last Mon-Wed, I had my first proper business trip to Kilosa District, Morogoro Region.

It's about 3hrs' drive to Morogoro town, then you go on unsurfaced, dirt road for about 2? or less than 2hrs, then you get to this little town called Kilosa.


What was I there for? I was with a mission that came from the Headquarter to collect information on agricultural irrigation schemes, in order to decide whether to contribute to the pool fund for irrigation in Tanzania.

In Tanzania, it is said that about 80% of the population works in agriculture sector (only accounts for about 25% of GDP). However, only 3% (the data might be a few yrs old) of the farmlands are irrigated and the rest relies on natural rain for cultivation.

Tanzania has rainy and dry seasons, now it is a dry season. And since I came just over a month ago, I was caught in a rain perhaps... like 4 times?

It's a pretty sunny country. Good for me, but not for farmers without irrigation.


So the need to build irrigation schemes is pretty obvious. Now, can the money be used effectively if provided?

Oh, by the way, those canals (drawing the water from nearby river to the land with no access to water source) on the pictures above/on the right are the typical "irrigation" stuff we mean.

People from Kilosa district council had a wish list of over 30 candidate sites for construction of new irrigation scheme, including a plan to build a small-scale dam. Very ambitious. Rather too ambitious, when you only have 6? technicians to supervise them. And apparently the lack of human resources in irrigation is acute not only in Kilosa, but all over the country.

So the current situation is like this: there is a massive need to improve irrigation (which also aligns with Kilimo Kwanza -Agriculture First - policy of the government), but no money, no adequate human resources. Even if we decided to contribute, a careful arrangement of technical cooperation and capacity development projects as a kind of side-support will be more than crucial...

This is just one problem among others in Agriculture sector, which is merely one (well, important tho) sector of a country... phew, thinking about the whole development path Tanzania will need to go through, it's challenging and exciting. But at the same time, it's too complicated, and makes me feel kinda dizzy...

Mikumi National Park

On my 4th weekend in Tanzania, I made a savanna safari debut!!!

Destination: Mikumi National Park.

Tanzania is very well known for its vast and rich nature reserve, the most known places being Serengeti National Park, Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Selous Game Reserve and so on.

Mikumi National Park is about 4-5hrs' drive away from Dar es Salaam, some people who know other great parks (like those mentioned above) say it's "just about okay"... but don't judge until you read/see this post till the end.. IT WAS AWESOME!

Perhaps it is a smaller park, but that means the wild animals are in a small area = easily found! a yay to that.

I went there with my colleagues+friends for a weekend; so we went for an afternoon safari till sunset, one night in the near-by motel, then morning-early afternoon safari the next day.


In two days, I saw: lions (female, and male!!!), elephants, giraffes, zebras, boars, hippos, guinea hen, buffaloes, buzzards, snake, gnu, impalas (and other deer-like creatures) etc etc..!!

What's so great about it? hm, I don't know what to say.. it's so DYNAMIC and COOL to see completely wild animals - animals you can usually only see in the zoo!

and the cool thing was, whenever we talk in the car like "hey, there aren't many giraffes, are there...?" then minutes after, voila, how many giraffes? We often bumped into the animals we were just wishing to see! :)

For example, after we talked about a person who loves reptiles...


A snake. lol

It may be small, but Mikumi does great magic, and it totally made my weekend :)


PS Even outside the gate of Mikumi National Park, there are so many animals on the side of the road. So it is just totally natural if you see this. "Beware of Elephants" :P