Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Friday, November 5, 2010
Final Day - Time to Summarize and Reflect
“Imagine as you just have won the world cup in football, you are sitting in the locker room after the final, you have the shiny buckle in your hand, and you feel warm, happy, exhausted and just extremely satisfied at the same time. In that moment, you feel that you have everything you need in live”
Actually, that feeling pretty summarizes how I feel now, the last night of this fantastic week. However, enough with feelings hit and dit. In this blogpost I will (1)try to tell you a little bit about our last working day at the Seaweed Center, (2)then evaluate the oucome of the week compared to the objectives in our project plan and at last (3) present to you the Top 5 List of the ICM School Project Week.
(1) The 5th of November started extremely early for a large part of the project group. The alarm clock rang already 4:30 and Viktor, Annika, Ida, Sebastian, Marcus Gave and Sebastian headed of to swim with dolphines before breakfast. After our second last breakfast at Zanzibar, half of the project group went to a well deserved time on the beach as the same Viktor and Daniel went to clean the factory, and also to have some quality time with the engineers and the machines a final time. Also, these two lovely students (one in the Business Arena and one in the Judicial Arena) made a plan how the factory will look like when the process is up and running. Of course, this factory plan is according to all the fantastic theories as an industrial engineer can mention in one breath (Lean, TQM, Kaizen etc etc.)
After lunch, the beach group had some quality time with the Seaweed Center stamp in order to finalize the last soaps before they were carefully packed in boxes yo bring to Sweden. Consequently, the quality of the soaps will be as high as possible on the ZanziBar Soap party on the 3rd of December. At last, the fourth and last workshop with the Seaweed ladies was performed. The theme of today was “English teaching”, and the fantastic teachers Ida and Annika performed almost the whole workshop wearing the Zanzibar traditional “Kanga”.
At the moment, myself is blogging in our mobile office (ak.a. the restaurant at the Blue Lagoon Hotel) while the rest of the group is working on a Seaweed Dance that will be perfomed on the Zanzibar Soap Party.
(2) Now, I will try to evaluate the performance of the project group by linking all our outcomes to the objectives of the ICM'11 school project.
Establish a market and create sales channels
- 20 sales meeting with hotels has been performed. In a clear majority of these, the marketing team has got an extremly positive response, and it is obvious that the Seaweed Center has a hole on the market to fill.
- A meeting with ZATI has been performed, with a number of praises as outcome along with promises of helping us with marketing in the future.
2. Development of the Operations
- Sebastian and Daniel has had hours and hours of quality time with the engineers, and today two of three machines are ready to be used.- Four computers with management control systems has been donated to the Seaweed Center and is ready to be used.
- A lot has been perfomed, both before and during the ICM'11 School Project week regarding packing and design of the soap. Today, the Seaweed Center has a product porfolio of protoypes that has been quality assured by input from the market.
3. Creation of legal and company structures
- The structure of the company has been done since months ago, and at the moment, the Seaweed Center are close to be registred as a company in Zanzibar.
4. Establish the Seaweed center as a knowledge center- Today, the Seaweed Center is used every friday as a lecture hall during english classes offered to the local people of the paje village
- During the project week an “English Workshop” were performed together with the ladies.
(3)As you can see, the project week has been a success. Still, there is a lot of work before the Seaweed Center will be up and running to 100 %, but we are today one step closer than yesterday. The week has been filled with activities and experiences that I will remember for all my live. Therefore, I will try to summarize the week in this fantastic Top 5 List;
5. the Seaweed ladies tour, when we got the opportunity to go with the ladies to their farm.
4. Ana of Zanzibar, a fantastic sales meeting at a fantastic hotel, that served a fantastic mango/passion juice
3. Sean Kingston - Fire Burning, the theme song of the week
2. Jamal, (boy to the left on the picture) one of the sons of the seaweed ladies. He charmed us all and also, at the age of 10, outcompeted Sebastian Palmgren in math skills.
1. The machine workshop with the Seaweed ladies, as I sais just like winning world cup in football.
At last, sorry for making this blog post too long, but it is hard to summarize a such fantastic week in less than 800 words. The plane to Sweden leaves in 17 hours. See you in school on Monday!
Best Regards
Viktor
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Good feelings - Thursday 21th of November - Sebastian
But before I tell you more about that, I'll tell you about last night's cliffhanger that Annika left us with in yesterday's blogpost; the party at Teddy's place. To put it short, it was a great experience dancing on the sandy outdoor dancefloor with a good mix of masais, tourists and social entrepreneurs.
“The marketing team” (Anders, Marcus, Viktor and Harish) was today in Stone Town so now everyone in the team has experienced the vibrant feeling of the exciting capital on Zanzibar. The prime reason was a scheduled meeting with ZATI (Zanzibar Association of Tourism Investors) but they also had some time for running errands buying stuff for the seaweed center. Marcus three spontanous key take-outs are:
A lot of people in general and a lot of very nice people in particular
Beautiful city
Poor air quality
Annika and Ida spent the morning doing a lot of things with the most important one being carving a wooden sign with the ICM logo which will be put together with the CSE logo on one of the walls of the seaweed center. We promise a photo of these once they are up! Both Ida and Annika have been working incredibly hard the last couple of days so they definitely deserved the break on the beach that they managed to take today (even though they prepared for our english class that will take place tomorrow during this short “break”).
Coming back to what made this day, at least for me, great. It all started two days ago with two amazing engineers arriving to Paje from University of Dar Es Salaam. Since then, me and Daniel have been working hard and well side by side with them in the soap factory, not leaving the cave until the sun set. They taught me a lot; everything from the nitty gritty details of soap production to how you eat the coconuts standing on the seaweed center garden.
So today, we organized a workshop for the seaweed ladies and 21 one of them showed up in the factory in the late afternoon. Me, Daniel and the engineers (translating to Swahili) demonstrated the whole process of how to make soap; from caustic soda and palm oil to extruded uniform soap bars. The women were very enthusiastic, took a lot of notes and asked a lot of questions. So what was so great about this day? We could officially say that the seaweed center's machines finally works!!!
After the workshop, we all went upstairs together with the women (I plan to introduce the descriptive term “the platform” for this place) and they thanked us all that have been working with the seaweed center (this goes especially to all of you guys at home) and gave us some delicous food containing seaweed.
Tomorrow is our last full day here in Paje. In order to make it a bit special we will do an excursion before breakfeast. We just got our fins and cyclops for tomorrow's tour as we are going swimming with dolphins at sunrise meaning that we leave from our beach house at 5:00 in the morning. We are all really excited but more about that in tomorrow's blogpost!
Take care and see you all soon!
//Sebastian
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Another amazing day at the Seaweed Center
What a day!
We started off in the morning before breakfast by following some of the seaweed ladies out to see how they harvested and worked with re-cultivating the seaweed. It was a fantastic morning and we all got test to disbud seaweed from the already growing strings, put down new sticks in the sand and tie the seaweed to the new string. We also had the opportunity to ask the women all about their seaweed farming!
The only one who did not participate in the seaweed tour was Daniel. He went up early to meet with the engineers at the Seaweed Center at 8, but when the engineers finally arrived the time was already 8.30 and they decided that they better eat breakfast before starting off with fixing the machines. So, Daniel concluded that his first 2 hours in the morning was for no use. :)
Hakuna Matata! This is Africa!
After breakfast we all splitted up in our different teams. Anders, Marcus, Viktor and Harish went to the nearby village Jambiani (or Jambalaya if you ask Viktor) to continue the selling and marketing work. There they got the recommendation to go north of Paje to the smaller luxury hotels, which seems to have been a great success according to the happy faces that came back! Ida and I (Annika) spent the day by fixing a lot of small things, like documenting everything we have learnt about soap production and raw material prices, started to make the ICM signboard that we will put on the wall of the seaweed center and running after Abel to get information about everything we needed to know. Sebastian and Daniel has worked really hard the whole day together with the engineers to get the machines to function. It took 3 hours to get a generator to drive the machines (all generators were already rented out due to all partying to celebrate the election!) but after that they started to run the blending machine with at least some success! There is some fixing needed before it will work properly, but we do at least have produced a first batch of soap mass!
Tonight there will be a party in Paje! It will start of at Paje Blue Lagoon where we eat all meal, and continue at a place called Teddy's place, and we are all looking forward to it! More about how it went in tomorrow's blogpost! :)
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Hakuna Matata – Hakuna Matiti – Hakuna Matako!
We woke up all excited about the second workshop with the ladies, this time taking place in the Seaweedcenter. At 9am everything was prepared and the ladies started to drop in, except for Monaisha – the only one who speaks English. After 45 minutes we were mentally prepared on doing the whole thing in body language and Swahili and we struggeled with explaining our thoughts based on our three page dictionary in Lonley planet. It was hard to know if the women were nodding politely or if they understood anything of what we were trying to say. When Annika showed the sign boards they got super excited about seeing themselves on the pictures and they wanted to bring them home. After some turbulent minutes Monaisha arrived and we could finally start a two way communication. We demonstrated the soap machines and what the shop will look like and then it was time to go upstairs to package the soap that was prepared this Sunday. Inspired from kids club arts and crafts sessions I tried to make a pedagogic work flow with different stations and the women took on the task with enthusiasm. After 1,5 intens hours we ended up with 350 soaps (that will be sold on the “ZanziBar Soap Party at Yaki-Da” Dec.3.) – SUCCESS! 
We showed our appreciation with a few applause and eating watermelon. We also made plans for having an English class on Friday and we will join the ladies tomorrow morning to harvest seaweed. During the workshop Sebastian found a new friend who outcompeted him in advanced subtraction.
There was no time to waste and despite yesterdays success it was time to go for another shopping trip in Stonetown. This time it was a girls´shopping trip and our new friend Monaisha came with us.Annika and I found ourselves bargaining oil prices in a small office in the suburbs and buying clove scent from a hole in the wall in narrow allyes. And I totally agree with Sparre “It´s not like the market in Nossebro”
Back at the hotel we were exhausted and there was only one thing to do – AW on the beach!
Monday, November 1, 2010
Stonetown shopping, 1/11 – 10 part 2/2
We bought a wheelbarrow for the women to carry seaweed from the ocean to the Seaweed Center. It had the guaranteed quality of carrying a hotel manager. Down in the deep and dirty allies we managed to find some caustic soda. Other purchases was grease and ”5-56”, which me and Sebastian used for making a face lift of the machines, while Annika, Ida and Tomas had a seaweed store design competition. 
Other day to day amusements are Sebastian's fear of falling coconuts, why he takes detours, and Harish's immense fear of rats and lizards, why he sleeps in jeans.
Daniel
DAY 3 - PART ONE (MARKETING TEAM) ...
By: Anders Sparlund
Disclaimer: Open Office does not include a spelling interface.
Weather wise, Monday morning was nice and sunny compared to Sunday's intense raining.
Breakfast is served at 8.30 at the The Blue Lagoon hotel. This day, it consisted of bread, omelett and fruits, among these some of the most delicous passion fruits that my eyes ever have witnessed. Being a loyal and faitful customer to the fruit- and vegetable range of Netto Odinsgatan, I must however retreat for the Zanzibarian fruit capabilities. Simply astonishing. Even the banans are kicking here.
At 9, the working day was initiated. For the Marketing Team, Monday was the day for taking first contacts with hotels in the close Paje area, seeing whetheer they were willing of becoming a collaboration partner to the Seaweed Center. The plan was to visit/attack the hotels in teams of two; Viktor/Harish and Sparren/Gamme.
We started the day by practising through the meeting scenario a final time, Sparren/Gamme being the critical hotel owner and Viktor/Harish being social entrepreneurs. After this session and evaluation, we were ready and eager to throw ourselves out in the blue ocean that is the hotel cluster of Paje.
Sitting in the car (driven by a local taxi driver holding valuable knowledge both in Paje geography and zanzibarian folkway) we probably all felt a bit nervous for a potential “belly-flop”. How would the hotel managers react on us showing up from the middle of nowhere? Would we be ignored like teenagers selling Omega 3 pills at Drottningtorget on a cold November morning?
We were about to realise, that our anxious feelings were truly unjustified.
The first hotel was owned by an Austrain, a veteran from the Dubai hotel business. He greeted us with a smile and we sat down. As we pitched the project and its different parts for him, we got to understand that he actually had already bought 100 packages of seaweed soap from the local women. He was very enthusiastic, both over the social sides of the Seaweed Center as well as the positive branding effect that the soap would have on his hotel.
For the marketing team, the rest of the day was a king's tour, confirming our hopes for a genuine demand of the services that the Seaweed Center has to offer. They were ALL interested in taking part in some way! True hapiness! We received all their contact information and a lot of good input on how the collaborations were to be constructed.
Apart from these prosperities, travelling from hotel to hotel the group atmosphere was both merry and pleasant, inviting to worthwile discussions. Harish for example gave some useful input about the tiger/panther situation of India.
At five o'clock, we were back at the “office” (the cousy and elevated bar of the Blue Lagoon Hotel). After creating a database and compiling the information from the day, we met up with the rest of the group in our “casual office lobby”; the Indian Ocean. We actually had the recapitulation out among the seaweed cultivations. Most supersonic.
Now we've had dinner. Everyting is calm. Everything is nice.
Best regards,
Anders Sparlund
Sunday, October 31, 2010
It's ON!
Sunday´s can be quite dull, others quite good. Some, however, can be flat out amazing! This was one of the more amazing once. After a peaceful night in our beach house, without any major animal- or bug encounters (but WITH some naughty stories signed Harish in the guys room), the group woke up well rested, ready to get down to business in Paje at around 8. Well, Sparre were the early bird starting the day with a beach-run in the rain at 7.30, which myself and Annika decided not to join because of the rain. Impressive. After breakfast, we walked over to the Seaweed Center and started the work. The different sub-groups that we are in looks like this:
Construction team – Sebastian and Daniel
Soapmaking team – Annika and Ida
Marketing team – Viktor, Harish, Anders and Marcus
Creative, free role team – Tomas
The construction team had some great progress at the Center. Both Sebastian and Daniel came back to lunch-break sweaty, dirty and sun-burnt. The machines have got some major updates, and the two also managed to get to the grindermachine, which had been locked up in a room in the center that we did not have the keys to. Magic!
Annika and Ida prepared the main event for the day, a soap workshop, that we had with the Seaweed ladies in the afternoon which I will get back to in more detail shortly.
The marketing team finalized the sales material and rehearsed the sales pitch to the hotels. After some hours, we now feel happy and confident about the coming days, and we have a well thought through plan on what hotels to approach, starting with Paje Monday and expanding to near-by villages Tuesday and Wednesday.
Now, back to the fabulous soap workshop. The event were held in the village of Paje in one of the womens´house, not at the Seaweed Center. We were introduced by a sweet girl, Monaisha, who translated, and we were all sat down at a bench outside the house.Then, the women guided us through the whole process of making seaweed soap. It goes like this:
Stir coconut oil (30-60 min)
Mix it with caustic soda
Add grained seaweed
Add scent of your selection (for instance sinnamon)
Pore into trays
Cut the "soap cake" into nice pieces
Stamp the soap
Wrap the soap
The women were extremely well prepared and Lädarn, who is always going on and on about streamlined processes and lean production (and who has been wearing a Billy-linne that he got from Sparre which he really loves), were impressed by how the women had prepared several of the processes in advance, and how they performed all of the steps in front of us. The action in the village of Paje dragged a lot of attention and we were joined by the cutest kids I´ve ever seen, a couple of cows and some lost tourists. We also learned some useful phrases in Zwahili, which we probably used far too much with the ladies and their families... But it was all good! I have a fun video of Annika and Ida interacting with the ladies, parttaking in the workshop which I will share with you all at a later occassion. Both of them also ran back and forth several times to make sure that the ladies had everything they needed. Big ups!
After an interesting workshop, filled with value creation, laughs, picture-taking and some misunderstandings, we made a deal with the ladies to conduct another workshop in the Seaweed center on Tuesday. During the day, the ladies produced 57 soaps, which was great.
After a short swim in the ocean and a shower break, we are now back at the Blue Lagoon Hotel. It's a very cozy place and I have to mention Able and RJ, two amazing guys working for Jan here in Paje, who provide invaluable information, tips and help as well as great food. Even since we've had a long day so far, it's far from over. The reason? Today we celebrate the arrival of the lost bags, which rendered a defening and deep happiness-growl from Viktor, Harish, Daniel and Sebastian. Of course, I celebrate with them, even though I like them equally much in their previous amazing outfits and smells.
Now, the others have patiently been waiting for me to finish this post (57 min and counting) so that we could head over to Paje by Night, some hotel with outside pool and bar, for some water and hard bread so I better finish. Hope you all are doing great. Cheers!!
Day 1 - “One learn more by walking 100 steps than reading 100 pages.”
As the above saying goes the team from ICM 11 learnt quite a lot by reaching Zanzibar than staying in Gothenburg and...........(you know guys what we do in Gothenburg).
Well,it was the day when 9 membered team from ICM 11 left rainy Gothenburg and reached sunny Zanzibar.And I would say the day was all about dealing with Uncertenies. It started right from when we were checking in at Landvetter Airport. I was the only one with non"Red passport" among the group of nine and we had our booking in groups i.e. some guys were tagged together. While checking in, when the lady at counter saw my passport she freaked out and said “you cant go like this” without stating clear reason...Finally she left all of confused by saying “you know what you are doing”. And then everyone got worried finally making me worried as well.All of a sudden I saw lot things happening in imaginary world.Then started the process of googling and calling...Everyone had a big quetion mark on their faces.
Finally, we got some positive info and we boarded on flight. We took our place as per the tickets, except Daniel.It took like 3 different arrangements for him to finally settle down. But after all this panic situation we had a nice session of photography.
Flight took off.......and landed in Stockholm where we had some snacks and then we headed to get on board to our flight to Adiss Ababa via Rome. But then there was a clash of Indian and Swedish understanding. It was 35 mins to flight and I thought we had enough time, for me start time and end time is a time window,which allows you to get in anytime in between but for my other friends it wasn't so. I went to Duty free shop to buy mankinds' two most tempting things....Rest all were waiting,looking for me and finally worring about me.But i was back in 10 mins and after that we all settled down in our places.But when I say "we" it exludes Daniel as he had to do a lot of permutation combinations again to settle down.
Well,there were lot of other incidences but key highlight is that when we landed on Zanzibar,only four of us didn't manage to get their luggages rest five got them right at the airport.Apperently, we were in a 8 by 10 room and working with a guy who was trying to help us.After one and half hour of paper work and chaos we left for the hotel.But this wasn't the end of uncertainities,Viktor came up with an idea of buying handy shorts and tshirt, cab driver was bit hesitant but he agreed to stop by a streat market for 2 mins. And biggest surpise broke in for some of the guys when had to buy things in such a manner,nothing organized. As per Sabastein there were people who were pretending to be your friend and trying push their prices on you. Well everyone who intented to by something bought something except me. For me it was hard...it is always hard to buy something that it is definately a bad deal.Though I managed to find the right deal but driver wasn't ready to stop for me so that i can even pay.I finally jumped into the running van.Anders was amazingly surprised as he was first time out of Europe.As per him it was a another planet.
Finally we reached the place where we were supposed to stay at around 5 p.m.We again did lot of shuffling and moving from one room to another. The reason was quite different,there were a lot of rats who had already occupied the places.Only when Marcus came us with a philosophy that If you havent stayed with rats then u havent seen Africa.So we settled in there.
Then we decided to take a bath in vast blue ocean in front of our house and that was the most relaxing time in past 24 hrs. We took quick shower after that and set ourself for Seaweed center.We had plans to start the process of soap production(planned time was 2.30 p.m) but due to some reasons we plan to start on Sunday morning instead.But we inspected the seaweed center and everyone was so overwhelmed by seeing it. We have been talking about seaweed center for past one and half year now but seeing it live was amazing.We were seeing reflections of our work in some things here and there.Due to darkness we had to leave for dinner.We had a nice dinner but that was not the end of uncertainities.There was no vegetarian food, so me being only vegitarian had to prepare my dish on the dinner table,I had rice with salt,pepper and ketchup.Though as per Ida it was too nice than she had expected....It is 9.23 p.m now,we are sitting aound a nice wooden table on sofas and some are one down some are two(you know what I mean).We have also planned our day for tomorrow and we hope that after this tireness dissolved into sleep we will carry out our planned activities tomorrow with mautifold enthusiasm.
Moral Of the day : “No matter how well you plan , always remeber to keep a room for uncertanities and pratical aspects”.
Hakunamatata !!!
//Harish from Seaweed Center,Zanzibar
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Less than 24 hours until we leave!
Tomorrow Viktor Eriksson, Annika Nyberg, Harish Sharma, Marcus Gamme, Ida Muncker, Daniel Eriksson, Anders Sparlund and Sebastian Palmgren from the class of ICM'11 together with the school manager of CSE, Tomas Faxheden will start their journey to Zanzibar and spend seven days of working with the Seaweed Center.
During the week the project group will work with activities according to the overall goals with the ICM project which are;
1. Establish a market and create sales channels
2. Development of the Operations
3. Creation of legal and company structures
4. Establish the Seaweed center as a knowledge center
We will live in the fantastic village of Paje and we will of course update this blog during the whole week! So, make sure to visit the www.seaweedcenter.blogspot.com in order to get the latest updates.
Wish us good luck!
Viktor
Friday, October 22, 2010
1 week to Zanzibar
First, I would like to present my apologizes for that the blog hasn't been updated for a while. Second, I would like to tell you that a lot has happened during the last couple of month. Fund raising activities has been successful, business models has been created, marketing activities has been performed and also a lot of effort has been put into get the operations of the Seaweed Center up and running.
However, social entrepreneurship is never easy, and is never performed without having to deal with a lot of challenges. Therefore, I am EXTREMELY happy to announce that 8 persons from the project group will leave Sweden for Zanzibar in a week to work on site with the Seaweed Center.
More updates will follow on this blog, so stay tuned.
On the behalf of the Seaweed Center project group,
Viktor
PS. This is how the Seaweed Center looked like a couple of weeks ago. D.S.
Monday, May 3, 2010
the Seaweed Center receives 50 000 SEK from the Chalmers Mastercard!
I have fantastic news - the Chalmers MasterCard have decided to support the Seaweed Center with 50 000 SEK!
The Seaweed Center project group is of course extremely grateful for the support!
Otherwise, the project group is working hard and is making progress. I hope to come back to you with some more details, and pictures how the Seaweed Center looks like at the moment.
Until that, take car
//
Viktor
Friday, March 26, 2010
Henrik Rydstöm promotes the Seaweed Center and the SMF website is up and running!
Fun things are now happening to the project as they were produced on an assemlby line.
First, one of Sweden's most famous football player Henrik Rydström is promoting the Seaweed Center on his very well visited blog.
Second, the SMF Forum, which is a one day fair created by the students of CSE/ICM now has a newly launched website. Go and visit it people!
At last, we have also been contacted by an American author, filmmaker and photographer now working at Harvard who are really interested in the Seaweed Center. But more information regarding this will follow in the future....
Have a really nice weekend!
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Tradera Sponsors the Seaweed Center!
I just got off the phone with Hampus Ektröm at the PR & Marketing Department of the auction site Tradera. After hearing about the Seaweed Center they decided sponsor the Seaweed Center by not charging any fees from the auctions that the Seaweed Center uses to sell soccer jerseys!
"At the moment, we are also running a number of charity projects and feel that the money from the fees will better be used by the Seaweed Center"
The Seaweed Center is of course very grateful and we thus hope that many companies follows the Tradera example.
//Viktor
Sunday, March 21, 2010
More media attention and a new shirt on Tradera!
Two fun happened the past week;
1. The very funny and talented blogger Martin Nilsson mentioned the Seaweed Center in his blog post www.mycketgutt.se
2. A new shirt, namely a signed shirt from Kalmar FF is up for sale at Tradera. Visit the auction here and take a look at the picture below.
//Viktor
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Media attention and auction of soccer jerseys
Both the CSE class, and Tomas and Annika that also was part of the trip to Zanzibar from the ICM class have now arrived back to Sweden. They have also shared information and pictures from the trip to the rest of the project team and it is easy to say that some fantastic progress has been made in the village of Paje. This can also, of course, be seen in the blog posts from the trip.
Furthermore, it is very fun to tell you that some of the signed soccer jerseys from the teams in the Swedish Allsvenskan are now up on the auction site Tradera. The t-shirts that now are up for sale are IF Elfsborg, GAIS, IF Brommapojkarna, Trelleborgs FF and Halmstads BK.
When promoting the auctions, the project team was in contact with the famous swedish sports journalist and blogger Robert Laul that works on the well known newspaper Aftonbladet. Very fun was that Robert Laul first mentioned the Seaweed Center project in his blog posts on the 7th of Mars and on the 8th of Mars (this is very fun since the blog has approximately 50 000 unique visitors every week).
Moreover, i his web-tv show Laul Calling, Robert Laul and his co-host Erik Niva also discussed the football on Zanzibar and promoted the Seaweed Center. This is very exciting since the tv-show has about 200 000 viewers. You can see the t-show here and the Seaweed Center part will come in minute 34.
That was all for now.
All the best!
Viktor
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Friday, 5th March – Last full day at Zanzibar
In the afternoon, we held another workshop for the women where we shared with them our ideas on how to package the soap and also shown them one of the machines (the mixer) which has been hooked up to the generator.
After the workshop, we continued to work by candle light to get the extruder and grinder working. At last, although some adjustments were still necessary, some soap was made. Unfortunately the outcome was not the same as expected. The soap did not look good and the worst was "diarrhea soap".
In the evening, we had a barbecue to celebrate our 12 days on Zanzibar. It was a sumptuous meal with barbecued octopus, squid, 2 of the fish which were caught during the deep sea fishing the day before, beef and spice-flavored rice. Jan Iversen and Masai joined us and we were able to express our appreciation and gratitude for the hospitality they had shown us during our entire stay.
After dinner it was off to ‘Paje by Night’ for one last party before heading home!
/Jan and Kati
Friday, March 5, 2010
Thursday 4th of March - Leisure day
In the afternoon, the class was split into two again. Some of the class went deep sea fishing on a speedboat, riding the ways at 62knots! In total, 5 kingfish and 1 travelly were caught. 2 of the kingfish were 2m long and about 30kg, it was a tough fight given that the fish were surprisingly smart, but it was a lot of fun at the same time and everyone came back tired but happy.
Part of the class headed for the Spice Tour, where we were introduced to local fruits and spices. It was an interesting trip as our guide took us around the plantation and we were picking and eating fruits and spices straight from the trees! We also had a three course traditional Swahili meal which was delicious, and a chance to buy lots of spices to bring back to Sweden.
Wednesday 3rd of March - Workshop on making soap
The day started with cleaning the soap machines and preparing them for start-up. Unfortunately there were some drawbacks, because we got wrong plugs for the machines and thus could not start. It was really nice to finally meet dr. Flower from eye to eye. The management team had a discussion with her of how Seaweed Center should work.
In the afternoon we had a workshop with the women about making soap. As the machines were not ready for usage, we had to conduct the workshop manually. Annelie and Jonas showed the soap making process step by step and dr. Flower translated it to the women.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Update from ICMers on Zanzibar
Tuesday 2nd March – distributing toys and women visiting Seaweed Center
Thereafter, we headed to the school where we saw how lectures are given and distributed pens to all of the students.
Jackie’s mission was to design a CSE sign for the Seaweed Center. Mikael, a carpenter from Denmark will help to carve the sign in couple of days.
The construction of drying racks continued throughout the whole day.
In the afternoon we finally had a chance to show the women how to use the racks at the Seaweed Center.
We also gave a general overview of the concept of the Seaweed Center and showed them around the facility. Everybody in our class was so overwhelmed to see the women for the first time in the Seaweed Center. The first impression from women was that they enjoyed being there and are very grateful for the effort we had made.
/Kati