Arjen Westra’s African Weblog

Been a kind of offline (moving in and out almost every country between Kenya and South Africa)in the past months, collecting stories from Africans telling about their lives, their frustrations and most of all: their dreams. I met fishermen on the Cape who are not allowed to fish and had to flee into crime and drugs, I met beachboys in Mombasa who in order to be more succesfull with a muzungu lady, are planning to visit a witch doctor ‘before the season starts’ to get a black magic battery in their wallet, and i talked to Tanzanians being frustrated about the fact that the country’s mining profits are disappearing abroad, other Tanzanians who believe that they can make a difference by starting a business and treating their employees in a human way by paying them a normal salary and treating them as human beings (soemthing you could not always say about so called decent companies in Africa., On the road i talked to Zambians that use chili to keep away the elephants from their village, to Kenians that keep hope for a better future although the new Grand Coalition Government cannot take away the impression that they are as clean as they pretent to be and to Namibians that are happy that there is no solution in Zimabwe ‘The money used to go to Zimbabwe but now the countries around (Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, Namibia) get some investment too… Look: none of the neighbouring countries are doing bad, in fact they are very fine.’ Stories will be available for my appreciated customers in Netherlands and Belgium.

Shortly you will find more grassroot audio and pictures online. Owners of an iPod: since a few months you can subscribe to the Official Africareporter.net Audiopodcast. Please subscribe by clicking this link iTunes users can go to the Itunes StorePodcast directory. Search for “Africareporter” and subscribe. Alernatively, you could visit this website: Podcast Directory But the best option for anybody is this link: Africareporter.net Podcast Enjoy. Comments and request are welcome! See you on the road!
Ok, enjoy your day, full of nice audio and pictures!

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Yes. A lot of people would be surprised to hear that nowadays in a lot of African countries we have mobile internet. I posted this text live from the streets of Dar es Salaam. Mobile internet brings Africa to the world! At the same moment it seems that I am walking through a world that has two speeds. On my left hand side, here and now, there is a hospital where tonight a lot of people will have died of diseases, like malaria, that could have been treated cheaply. But because of the fact that they could not afford the medicine or say health insurance, they will die. Others cant make a choice because they cant afford to use a condom. Death is always around the corner on this continent. And still: i see people surviving, the streets in Dar are busy from early morning until late. Why? There is no choice. Lets not talk about some airtime to go on the internet.

I am in Dar es Salaam at the moment. Four million people of which 70 percent in informal settlements but huray, they can enjoy these views, for free and almost daily! This one is for Dar Dreamers!

Tanzania’s economy is growing with an impressive 7 percent a year. Almost 18 percent of the GDP is being earned by tourism. The expected growth in number of tourists is much bigger than the National Parcs will be able to handle in the future. The parcs, in terms of beds are full. So: developing tourism on other spots than the Serengeti and Lake Manyara, is becoming more important and the question how much money from the economic growth is reaching the people (like Maasai) is becoming more important. In order to start monitoring what is happening with the money, the Tourist Confederation of Tanzania came up with an initiative during a seminar organized by Karibu, one of the most important Tourism and Travel Fairs in East Africa. I had a short talk with Andrew Williams, coordinator of the Tanzania Natural Resource Forum (listen to the small interview below), one of the initiators (Interview Made on Mobile Phone). And… a growing number of people is getting my free email-updates. For those who did not subscribe: please leave your email-adress on the top right! You will get an update in your inbox everytime I updated this Blog. Thanks and have a nice day!

Testing some audio. In the middle of changing this Blog a bit more in a multimedia Blog, so you don’t fall asleep with all my writing ;-). Soon, you will find my Mobile Phone Made introduction video on my Contact-page (see above). In order to make posts more accessable I added some tags in the sidebar. Try and enjoy. Remember: it’s still under (re-) construction. Like seeing you coming back. At the moment I am in Arusha, Tanzania, working on a feature about ‘responsible’ tourism, human-wildlife conflict among others. Enjoy your day!