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:

1. Stir coconut oil (30-60 min)

2. Mix it with caustic soda

3. Add grained seaweed

4. Add scent of your selection (for instance sinnamon)

5. Pore into trays

6. Cut the "soap cake" into nice pieces

7. Stamp the soap

8. 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

Less than 24 hours until we leave!

Dear reader,

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

1 week to Zanzibar

Dear reader,

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.