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
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