Green, green, green banana’s everywhere. The sweet smell of matoke mixes with the smell of sweating locals coming aboard. I took the night boat from Bukoba in Tanzania to Mwanza. It’s a ten hour journey. The boat leaves Bukoba, one of the major economic cities in Tanzania around 21.30 at night and arrives in Mwanza at around seven in the morning. The boat has three classes and a fourth class: for matoke and (like last night) a coffin. Matoke or green bananas are the staple food for a lot of people around the lake. On the way the boat stops once in Kemondo Bay where more matoke comes aboard. The big bunches of matoke have marks so people can easily recognize which bunch is theirs. It was not the first time I took the boat and I noticed a small

The digital gap is getting smaller: the thing is: we don’t see that it is really getting smaller because desert places get connected and they are out of our sight. At the moment I am enjoying rather quick internet in the deep south of Uganda (in the village Buhoma to be more precise, a few kilometers from the Congolese border). The cybercafe was set up for the purpose of sending medical reports on gorilla dung to the headoffice in Kampala. In case of an emergency Kampala can send a vet. The cyber is partly financed by the fees (360 usdollar) that people pay for gorilla tracking in the nearby Bwindi Inpenetratable Forest National Parc.   

Don’t misunderstand me: I am not supporting piracy. But wandering through the streets of Nairobi I wondered if piracy is really so bad as some research suggest. Kenya was singled out as one of the number one piracy countries in the world. Imagine: 30 percent of al the books you find in Kenya are pirated and 90(!!!) percent of al music is pirated. The entertainment industry tends to complain about this, which is understandable, but on the other hand: hundreds of fathers are coming home every night to feed their children with the money that they made with selling pirated CD’s in Nairobi’s streets. Guess who is buying those CD’s and DVD’s. It might be interesting to make the sum and find out what is costing more: non-effective development aid or piracy… and: who really pays the price? I am