The adventure begins!

It has been a while since our departure at Brussels airport, but here it is: our first blog post! After a week of impressions, we have a lot to say, so make yourself comfortable, take a drink and enjoy this post! To get the best out of this post, we highly recommend some backgroundmusic: just type something like ‘african music compilation’.

After a year of preparations, we left the rainy Belgium behind us and travelled by plane to Dar Es Salaam. The flight went pretty well except that Jonas lost his tickets, Milan lost his vietnamese hat and Femke forgot her bag with her laptop at the Dar Es Salaam airport. Luckily lost things can be found again! Once arrived in Dar Es Salaam, a jeep of the Mzumbe university was waiting for us to drive us to Morogoro. After a trip of 4 hours, we arrived at the university campus. Mara (one of the people who work on this project) showed us our house and the most important things on the campus. Louis Van Gaal would say: ‘we fell with our butt in the butter’. We have a big home wich we share with a few geckoes (we’re sure Femke will be friends at the end of our stay).

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Once we were settled, we had to meet all the important persons of the university, guided by prof. Aurelie, who already calls us her grandchildren. After this day we already learned some basic Swahili like jambo (hello), mambo (how are you), poa (I’m fine) and karibu (welcome).

The next day we drove to the office of the Mvomero district (where our project takes place of course) to let them know we’ll be doing this project for the next weeks. After this 2 hour long ride, we went to some carpenters who already have a lot of experience in making beehives. This was also the first time we came in touch with the apparently friendly Tanzanian bees. Afterwards we went to the carpenters whom we are working with to introduce ourselves and to see if they had all the necessary materials to make beehives. If we have to get somewhere we have a driver called chowo (we hope we spelled it right) and our personal project guide Nico. We could say that we are already used to the ‘Polé polé’-lifestyle.

Wednesday we bought our first Top Bar Hive from the first wood shop so we can see precisely how they make those. Based on that example, we drew some plans to be able to teach the carpenters of our project how to make decent Top Bar Hives. Later that day, we wanted to go to the VLIR-office (the office of the university dealing with the beekeeping project) but we were stopped by a bee swarm, hopefully that is a good sign!

The next morning Milan and Jonas finished their plans in the library so we could take them to the carpenters. The carpenters immediatly started to make a beehive, while Faith gave them some extra instructions in Swahili. In less then 2 hours, they made a beehive, despite missing some materials. We discussed on the price and made a first order of 25 hives. We heard from Nico there are some hollidays next week (from the 5th till the 7th of July), so we can plan a trip.

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Yesterday (Saturday), Nico took us to the Masai market (just google masai and you’ll know who they are). It wad interesting to see the whole food supply chain at one place: from a living cow to a delicious piece of meat. For some people seeing this could be a reason te become a vegetarian, but let’s not forget how cruel the meat industry in our western world is!

For the people who skipped the text till this part: welcome, you missed a lot, but at least you got some fun facts:

Mzumbe University:

• Everything is on the campus: a bank, small shop, African Alma, and a bar!

• We can see the EK football in a bar (unfortunatly we saw the Red Devils losing)

• Also, around 4000 students all live on this campus so there is a lot of life. Right now, they all have their finals

• The weather is great, the sun is great, sometimes it even hides behind some clouds to make travelling nice around in Morogoro

Plans for the future:

• Visit a professor in beekeeping at the Sokoine University

• Visit the local beekeeping groups and see how many Top Bar Hives they need. We will provide them some hives made by the carpenterd (so it’s a double win). We’ll also try to improve their beekeeping methods.

• On the long term, we hope the beekeepers and carpenters can do all those things by theirselves

• A safari to Ruaha National park and a hiking trip though the Udzungwa mountains

Tuonane baadaye!