Back in Moshi

Hey all!

We had a wonderful and relaxing weekend in Zanzibar and have returned to cloudy, cold Moshi renewed and ready do do what we can to finish up this project this week. Before I make you all jealous describing our bungalow on a secluded beach or the marvelous fruit and spices that filled the Stonetown market, I wanted to say a few more things about organizations we met with in Dar.

Dar was an experience. We didn't exactly expect to like the city going in. Its hot, crowded, and sort of dangerous. We were clutching our purses wherever we walked and were careful to take taxis at night. Not to worry you Mom and Dad, but we were walking down the street and saw some guy grab an entire rack of phone credit (minutes) cards. We were especially careful after that. We had fun at the university though and met up with some other american studens studying abroad for dinner, including one student from Brown. It was interesting to hear about their impressions and experiences and especially interesting to get a taste of an african university.

Besides what Nat mentioned in her post, we also met with TaTedo's national headquarters. The most interesting thing that came out of this is that they are in the testing phase of a new kind of biodigester called the Vacvina (a technology from Vietnam). This digester involvs a massiave cement rectangular box as the digester and costs around 900 USD to make. They are very excited by the technology but can only forsee cutting the cots down to about 600 USD by using burnt bricks instead of cement. We are skeptical of the average family being able to afford anything like this and mentioned our own digesters that cost less than 150 USD for one family. Although they have never done their own tests with tubular plasic digesters (like ours), they previously decided that such digesters were too easily damaged.

We then headed to Simba plastics, an indian plastic company in Dar es Salaam with more intense security than any government office we have visited so far. We were directed to Simba by Kimario who reported ordering plastic biodigester bags from them to replace the broken bags in Uru. Armed with visitor badges we were taken upstairs to meet with the head guy at the company (I think they thought we were going to place an order for a couple thousand plastic containers or something...oh well) who proceeded to show us pictures of his biogas project on Zanzibar. Really cool, but they use massive plastic tanks and do not even sell sheet plastic bags. Confused and frusterated, we have now hit a road block. We can't promote biogas technology unless there is an incountry supplier for plastic bags. We're still looking into various sources to try to find some plastic bags in TZ, but no luck so far.

The other two organizations we met with in Dar were the Tanzania Forest Conservation Group and Agenda for Environment and Responsible Development. TFCG promotes a lot of income generating projects, tree planting and the use of fuel efficient stoves but does not do biogas there are not cattle keepers in the areas where they work. One thing that we could asertain from our meeting with them is that there is no real data on the extent of deforestation in TZ. We've gotten numbers which range from 10,000 hectares per year to 500,000 hectares per year. Miriam and I went to Agenda while Adam and Natalie visited the environmenal engineers. Agenda works alot wih formulation and implementation of government policy. Their main efforts to combat deforestation are awareness raising activities and promoting tree planting. They also promote energy efficient stoves through the ministry for energy and minerals which we ran out of time to visit while in Dar. Dorah Swai, the lady we met with was very excited about biogas technology having visited a woman who had a digester and had thus increased her income and bettered her lifestyle. These two organizations seem like prime candidates for promoting of biogas on a larger scale in TZ in the future. While we feel that we are not in a position to play a direct role in such promotion, we will write up a comprehensive report of our findings about biogas based on the pilot project in Uru and send both of these organizations our report. Hopefully our work will help them make their own decisions about biogas.

I've said a lot, so I won't spend much time talking about the wonderful time in Zanzibar. We did get to meet with one organization while in Stoneown, the ICSEE (International Collaboration for Science Energy and Evironment) which is based in Wayland, MA. Mr. Omar had some interesting perspectives on fuel efficient stoves and promotion techniques, although he thought that biogas was not viable for Zanzibar because there were not enough cows. He was incredibly welcoming and after our meeting, he showed us around Stonetown and the suburbs and took us back to his home for juice and to meet his family. We spent about 45 minutes talking to all of them about Zanzibari cooking, the Swahili language and anything else. It was great to meet them, we always love experiencing TZ hospitality, which is incredibly welcoming at any level of income. After a night in Stonetown we headed to the east coast of the island to Pongwe where we floated in the water, frolicked in the moonlight, and rolled around in the sand for two straight days. On our way out on Sunday we stopped in the Jozani forest to look at some Red Colobus Monkeys, a species which only exists on Zanzibar. You can get so close to them! Look out for pix when we get home!

Now we're back in Moshi and have big plans for the next week. We have invited both Thomas Makunda from TaTEDO Moshi and Albert from Floresta to Uru to see our stoves. We hope that they can give us some more expert opinion on the viability of biogas in the region. We also hope that they will be able to spread the project once we are back in the States, should they decide that it is a good technology for the region. We are headed to Uru today (hopefully) to continue our evaluation and interviews of people with biogas digesters there. Check back later for our progress as we wrap stuff up!

~ Melea