Hiking (to) Kili

Our group is now complete. Miriam arrived today after 24 hours of flying in which she had an air tour of Rome, Ethiopia and Kenya before arriving here in Moshi this afternoon. Adam, Natalie and I have had an exciting day or so. Yesterday (Sunday) we had a free day with no meetings or anything todo, so we took a daladala to Marangu. Marangu is one of the two main places where people start hiking Kilimanjaro from. The people that live in the Marangu area are Chagga, a tribal people who do not speak Swahili, but instead speak their own language. (Also, the people in Uru - where the biogas stoves were built in January - are also Chagga.) In Marangu we learned a little about Chagga culture. One aspect that continually came up with our guide and other people we met was the Chagga punishment for sex before marriage. I'll spare you the gruesome details, and just tell you that it ends in death for both parties. After these interesting tidbits of Chagga culture, we hiked for about two hours uphill to the base camp for those hiking Kili and got to enter Kilimanjaro National Park for a quick look around. It was awesome to learn about the different routes up and talk to people who had just made it down. We're all determined to come back and try it someday. Although, I've got to get in better shape considering the hike to base camp tired me out.

Our hike up was also my first experience in a more rural environment outside the city of Moshi. We loved seeing all the kids who would come running out from their houses to greet us with "Jambo" and "How are you?" (the only Swahili and English they knew)

This morning we wandered over the the Moshi municipal government to meet with people in the "Sustainable Moshi Programme" or the "Urban Planning and Environment" department. It's awesome that you can just walk into a government office and meet with people then and there. This one guy, who turned out to be the director for the department of health for Moshi was just sitting in an office meeting with people as they came in, even though he clearly had stacks of paperwork that needed to be finished on his desk. The simplicity of it all and how accessible the government is to the people here was amazingly refreshing. When we finally got to the right department, we were able to have a very informative discussion with the woman in charge of environmental management in Moshi about the environmental issues within Moshi. The major issue include water pollution, waste management, and the pollution created by the informal sector which is nearly impossible to regulate. While her department doesn't have jurisdiction over the rural areas surrounding Moshi and therefore she was unable to tell us much about deforestation concerns, she did reiterate many of the concerns about the expense of electricity that we heard about in our previous meetings. Electricity only accounts for 70% of the daily demand in Moshi, the rest is filled with firewood, charcol, kerosene, and gas stoves.

In addition, we were able to gain some useful insight into the workings of the Tanzanian government. Apparnetly, all policy is national (rather than determined regionally as individual states do in the United States) and is written by ministries located in Dodoma and Dar es Salaam. Local governments only implement this policy in their regions. When asked her opinion about energy and environmental policy in Tanzania, she said that there have been very few tangible results despite the fact that an energy policy was written into law in 1992. She seems to think that the policies are headed in the right direction, but that no actual changes can occur without grassroots action and many people speaking out about the problems. A government offical offers an interesting and different perspective than we heard from NGO's on Saturday and we are beginning to see how the different aspects of our project (Engineering technology and policy and culture) can all come together.

Thats all for now! sorry for the long post - we'll try to keep them down in the future! Tomorrow we head to Uru though, so check back for updates on how the digesters are doing.

Melea