Saturday, September 29, 2018

Project Zawadi

I(Dan) am in a different part of Tanzania volunteering with an education NGO called Project Zawadi.  They support education in Mara region east of Lake Victoria and are also working to improve teacher training.  My role for this trip is to visit two secondary schools and evaluate their capabilities for science laboratories and try to start some science and technology clubs. I have a couple computers and a projector and will blog later on what we end up doing with them.

Yesterday I was in Arusha and spent the day with several former IT students of mine from University of Iringa.  We had a fun visit and I met the staff of another company, SmartCore, which does multimedia educational content and has impressive capabilities.  They potentially could be helpful with Project Zawadi's teacher training modules.  This morning I flew to Mwanza on Lake Victoria which is the lake that recently had a terrible ferry boat accident.  I went down to the lake to see the impressive Bismark Rocks named after an early German officer.

Looking forward to meeting my host, Adrian, later tonight and going to Nyamuswa where the schools are.  One other nice new thing is my T-Mobile service works now in Tanzania with data and unlimited text messages and calls at .25 per minute.  More to follow when things start happening.
Timothy and Ayoub in their office space for a new company they are planning.
Timothy with George Akilimali, the CEO of Smart Core.

Precision Air was a nice hour + flight to Mwanza.  I saw Kilimanjaro but didn't get a good picture.  It was covered with fresh snow.  I spoke with climbers who had to come down early because 30 inches of snow was expected at the top.
Lake Victoria and some of the rocks they are famous for "Rock City"