Another amazing day at the Seaweed Center

Wednesday November 3^rd

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! :)