Karibu, welcome: some background info

Jambo!

So we've been busy the past couple days, walking around Moshi, trying to learn a few words of Kiswahili so I don't sound like a totally naive tourist (its going slowly), and setting up meetings with people around the area.

I wanted to give some background information to supplement Natalie's last post for anyone who was not up to date on Assida's previous blog (assida.blogspot.com if you want to check it out) from their January trip.

One of our principal contacts in Moshi, the city up north where we are currently staying and where the group stayed in January, is Ibrah, who is a program officer for Cross Cultural Solutions. CCS is a program which hosts international volunteers from all over for 3 weeks - 3 months and places them in volunteer positions in the area for that time. We had the opportunity to visit CCS yesterday and it really is a fantastic organization and seems to give volunteers a good sense of life here. Ibrah is really fun to hang out with and a pretty funny guy, hes also great at putting us in touch with people and helping us set up various parts of our trip.

The other person we are working with is Mr. Kamario, who runs a local NGO called TRETA (Trans Regional Environmental ... something...). Last year he helped build an irrigation system in the village of Uru, which paved the way for the building of biogas stoves there in January (since water is one of the principal inputs to biogas technology). This trip, Kimario is setting up meetings with various other local NGOs as well as arranging trips to Uru with us so that we can check out the progress of the biogas technology. We had two meetings today that Kamario set up for us and also visited his office. They were very interesting and we learned a lot. Adam is posting about those meetings now so be sure to check that out.

Some final background info on our project. Nine biogas digesters were built in the village of Uru, a village consisting of somewhere around 100 people. The digesters that were built cost around 100 USD and are composed of a system of plastic tubing. The inputs are water and manure and it outputs enough methane gas to power a cookstove for basic daily cooking. Without biogas or other energy saving technology, the women of Uru would walk 10 - 15 km daily to gather firewood, spending up to 6 hours of their days doing so. We haven't been to Uru yet, but as Natalie mentioned, reports from the 5 working digesters have been good and women have only had to gather firewood once a week or so, using the rest of their time to increase their vegetable crop production, which they can then sell to supplement their families income.

So thats the basics, hope that helps anyone new to Assida's blog in understanding our previous and future posts. We will be in Tanzania through August 26th, so keep checking back for updates! We look forward to reading your comments here or via e-mail!

~ Melea