Good contacts in Zanzibar and P:emba

If you are planning to be in Zanzibar and Pemba , I can recommend several reliable people who can help make your visit more pleasant.

First, our taxi driver and guide on Zanzibar, Mohammed Said Kassim. He can meet you at the airport and take you where you want to go or help you find lodging. He is extremely reliable and pleasant. You can call him in advance from the mainland if you want him to pick you up at the airport. If you are travelling there by ferry , I would call him and let him know when you plan to arrive but since the dock area is very crowded it might be better to get off the ferry and go to a more specific place like the Bondari Guest house nearby and meet him there. The Bondari is two minutes walk from the ferry dock. Go out the gate and turn left on the first street. It's about the fourth building on the right. Mohammed's number is 255 777428 251. His English is impeccable. And he really appreciates it if you know some Swahili.

If you go to Pemba, I can recommend the services of Nassor Haji Nassor who operates Coral Tours on Pemba. HIs telephone is 0777 437397, email is coralnasa@yahoo.com He can arrange to meet you at the airport. His office is in Chake Chake. He can arrange the trip to Misali Island from Pemba and tours around the island, rental of motorbikes or bicycles and book flights back to Zanzibar or the mainland. He is a very personable young man and is there to help you enjoy your stay in Pemba. Any hotel in Chake Chake can contact him for you.

June 30, 2011
The Lost Safari Gets Off to a Slow Start

Carrying cash to Central Africa is a somewhat daunting task from both ends of the voyage. In Africa, US dollars still speak, but only if they are clean, crisp, and of recent printing date. A slight tear can render the bill worthless or of less than full value.

I thought it would be easy to pick up fresh new currency at my local branch bank in Ohio, but found it was not the case. “No sir, we only get new 100’s at Christmas time.” I went to at least six outlets to secure new 20’s, 50’s , and 100’s. Had a good money belt , actually three to stow them on my person. Credit cards and ATM’s do not exist in Burundi , and there are only a few in Rwanda. Once in Tanzania, they become quite common. But up until one gets to Tanzania or Kenya, they better hang onto their cash or have a good contact in country who can supply you with dollars if you lose yours or they get stolen. So loaded for trade, I headed from Dayton up to Detroit and crossed the border to Windsor to meet my daughter Dominique and granddaughter Marie Gabrielle (11 years) at 10:00PM at the train station. They leave near Montreal and would be joining me on this my 4th trip to Central and East Africa to train mediators. They were on time, and we headed to the tunnel under the river into Detroit and on to our hotel in Dearborn. Unfortunately we were waylaid by US immigration to be ‘randomly screened’ in the the immigration office. There we met head on with US officialdom along with a busload of tourists of varying third world origin. Each person was being individually interviewed (read interrogated in a not very polite way) before being accepted or rejected for entry. We were told to wait our turn and take a seat. Seats were not being offered to the people who were visibly ‘foreigners’ , ie. non whites or browns. If they wanted to use the restroom , they were told they should have used the one on the bus. Could they go back to the bus to relieve themselves? No. Just wait here by the restroom that you can’t use.

We spent forty five minutes watching this circus of the damned before being allowed to pass over into the combat zone of Detroit. We didn’t even get to put our hands in the electronic fingerprint machine like all the others. Later in our travels we would be fingerprinted in Tanzania before being allowed into their country after paying $100 for the visa. Border efficiency was much higher in Tanzania. You may find this shocking, but it is true. Common human courtesy was also of a much higher order in Tanzania. Fortunately I’m old enough to know that protests of injustice are futile in an immigration office. So we remained silent and finally crossed into the US bearing our US passports around midnight. Welcome to the USA. Next day we would fly to Africa.

The plan is that I will be doing mediation training in Kigali, then we will head to Bujumbura , Burundi where I will meet with a new group of mediators to do some advanced training. In the third week we will go back to Rwanda to a Catholic parish a bit off the beaten path, Muhondo, and introduce mediation in that area. Our contact in Muhondo is Fr. Pascal Tuyisenge who works with Project Congo and who has visited Dayton last year. He had accompanied me to Springfield, OH where I work in the court system as a mediator. Our last stop will be in a very interesting part of Tanzania, Pemba Island which is going to be new for me. Pemba is located about 30 miles north of the main island of Zanzibar. It is an almost completely Moslem community, and we will be working with magistrates and judges from the Sharia courts which exist on the island. Even the town Chake Chake where we will do the training has an exotic ring in its name.








July 1-2 The Lost Safari Shifts Gears But the Clutch is Slipping

In Dearborn, MI, we buy Gabrielle a pair of binoculars for game viewing and head to the airport. Immediately our flight to Chicago is delayed and then rerouted to go around a storm that is moving through Chicago. After going into Wisconsin north of Milwaukee we head back down to Chicago and arrive somewhat late but still able to make our connection on American Airlines to Brussels. Well not quite. The American flight is delayed several hours due to needed repairs. This makes it impossible to hit our connection to Kigali, Rwanda from Brussels. We’re told before leaving Chicago that they will take care of us when we get to Brussels.

In Brussels we are put up in the Sheraton Hotel at the airport , given food vouchers, and told that we will spend the night in Brussels, travel at 6:00AM to Amsterdam next day and leave Amsterdam at 9:00PM for Kigali. This will put us a day behind our planned arrival. Fortunately I’m able to get to an internet at the hotel and inform David Bucura , our Rwandan host to expect us later than planned. We spend the day in Brussels on a tour bus or walking around the old town, then get up at 4:30AM to make the 6:00AM plane to Amsterdam. We’re jet lagged and tired on the trip to Amsterdam. But the up side is we see some of Brussels and get the unexpected time in A’dam where we visit the Anne Frank house, jump on buses that we have no idea where to pay the fare, jump off without paying and get into the Van Gogh museum in the afternoon where we are in a state of near collapse, unable to appreciate the ‘Sunflowers’ and other great works of Vincent. We stagger outside and sleep on the lawn behind the museum until told by the police to move because they are doing and emergency evacuation exercise. By 7:00PM we are at the train station and headed to Schiphol Airport where our Kenya Airways plane leaves on time and arrives early. Most convincingly, Africa proves more efficient than the West..

July 3 George Celebrates a Sleepy 68th Birthday

Our flight to Nairobi arrives 45 minutes early, but then we have a 7 hour wait in the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. In that time two nearly empty flights to Kigali depart. We ask to be put on those flights but are told that we must travel with our checked baggage. Can’t our checked bags be put on one of those flights? “Oh no, Sir, impossible.” I have a feeling the response would be the same in most towns. I later learned that Chake Chake airport on the island of Pemba could have made the move and accomplished that mission. The last time I was in the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, there was a ground worker strike, and I ended up spending three days here with thousands of irate Westerners, so my recurring nightmares of that ordeal started to replay at fast forward. Nevertheless we managed to survive and took our flight to Kigali via Bujumbura, Burundi. We arrived at 1:00PM and David was there to meet us, and he informed me that I would start teaching in an hour at 2:00PM. Everyone was waiting. Dominique and Gabrielle went to bed and I droned through 3 hours of teaching. I don’t remember a thing I did. These folks had all been trained by me over the past four years, so I asked if they had any questions and I took it from there. They helped me to the guest cottage on the grounds and I plopped into bed for the night.




July 5

The class finishes up on Tuesday the 5th. Most people seem to have gained some useful experience and are competent mediators. They have no direct referral system through the courts in Rwanda. However church pastors are often the referral source for mediation in this country. Some mediators are also known in the community as peacemakers and cases show up unannounced at their door. There is no record keeping system in place to give me an accurate indication of how many cases are being done. This is always a bit frustrating when I come over here.

July 6 The Road to Bujumbura

We purchase our tickets on the Belvedere Lines , the best buses in the region. The Mercedes buses have been replaced by Japanese buses made for much smaller people than myself or for long legged Tutsi’s as well. Our bus leaves at 8:30AM. The trip through mountainous country much like West Virginia is uneventful. The price of a three-day visa has risen from $30 to $40. There is a new bus terminus in Bujumbura on the edge of town rather than downtown. This has been done I’m told, because of terrorist threats due to Burundi’s participation in peacekeeping in Somalia. The group al-Shabab is thought to be threatening any nation that puts troops on Somali soil. They’ve have already bombed a terminus in Kampala, Uganda with significant loss of life.

We get two rooms at the Pacific Hotel, $60 total per night and then head down to the Quaker office a few blocks from there to meet our counterparts and also to meet Leon Alenga and other members of OPOD, the women’s sewing co-op we founded two years ago to buy sewing machines for underprivileged women in Uvira in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They have been struggling of late due to losing a building they had been renting where they could work together and learn from the better couturiers. We present them with $1000.00 that I collected from friends and colleagues, and Dominique gives them another $500 that she has raised from the sale of her glass jewelry. We want this money to purchase three more sewing machines and also to help start some other small businesses for women in Uvira. We’ve also brought about $4,000 of medical equipment and medicines and a microscope to be carried by them back across the border to be used at two Quaker clinics, one in Abeka and one in Luvungi. Had we gone over to the Congo it would have cost us $200 each for visas, which we felt could be better used as cash to put into the co-op. After speeches, prayers, and songs, we exchange our gifts as they have brought Congolese dresses for Dominique, Gabrielle, Anne, her little sister, and Marie my wife. After our meeting we all have dinner at the Hotel Pacific, and we give them an extra $100 for the expense of coming over here to meet us.

We say our goodbye’s and prepare for the next two days of advanced mediation training with the Burundians.

Later we learn that on the way back across the border into the Congo, Leon was arrested on some trumped up charges to extort money from the group. Some of the medicine was outdated as well and this caused some problems as well. We all was said and done Leon was liberated the next day, but it cost a little over $400 dollars to get him out of the clink. Actually the term is ‘cachot’ which is a little private jail that some magistrates use in the Congo to extract money from innocents. They can hold a person up to 72 hours without charges until money changes hands. There is a retired lawyer from Peace and Justice up in Goma who is constantly pleading cases for these victims of justice.

July 7 The Lost Safari Locks in on Bujumbura

We’re settled in to the Pacific Hotel, this Graham Greene set piece that could be in Vientienne, Singapore, Ououagaduogu, or Victorian Sydney. We walk to the Greek owned Kapa Boulangerie and have bread and butter and coffee before going on to our training session. This will be an advanced session of previously trained mediators, much like the course I did in Kigali. Only this time I’m over my jet lag.

Phillip , one of my favorite mediators of all time is there as well as Josiah who participated in the monumental case of rape and land inheritance three years ago. Terrence who mediates land disputes between returning refugees and the current tenants of their abandoned lands is here, as well as a few new faces who received training from other folks. The church which was under construction when I was last here in 2009 is now complete and large, though still needing decoration inside. It is bare concrete. The office space on the second floor is not yet complete , but it has a nice openness and ambiance that comes from some carefully thoughout design. Pastor Elie who was formerly a civil engineer building bridges in the countryside was instrumental in the design. He says an architect gave him some help along the way, but it is basically his baby.

Pastor Elie is number two Quaker in the chain of church officials in Burundi. He also sits on the organizing committee that is planning for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that will be active here for two years in 2012 and 2013. The model will be a modification of the South African Truth and Reconcilliation Commission inspired by Desmond Tutu. It needs little reminder here that protracted violence since independence in the early 1960’s has cost the country over 500,000 lives and resulted in thousands of citizens fleeing the country for over thirty years, forced to live in refugee camps in Tanzania and the Congo. These refugees are being forced out by the Tanzanians and the country is faced with stuffing these people somewhere in one of the most densely populated areas of Africa. It seems that mediation will become one of the tools that will make resettlement a practical solution.

We quickly review the process of transformative mediation focusing on deep listening , looking for opportunities to promote recognition and empowerment between the parties and inscribing an agreement if one occurs. Then we look at the future and the challenges facing us and what we outsiders can do to help. I suggest that our presence is much less important than it may have been a few years ago, but that our financial support may be more important now. These Quakers have done some incredible work in reconciliation already and in monitoring elections in places where there had been significant violence in the past. They politely disagree that outside intervention is not needed, that we should still return occasionally to work with them. I take that as kindness and respect more than actual need. I still want to be there with them, and I feel a deep link to them and their work. I’m here for hours at a time. They are here for the rest of their lives, and some of their days are very risky and dangerous. We conclude our training at 1:00PM on the second day July 8. At the end, they asked Gabrielle if she would like to make a speech. She had helped pass out certificates to the participants and had sat through the two days of adult conversations. She handled herself very well and with a lot of self confidence telling them someday she wants to be like them. I think they were quite moved as was I.. .

Two of the three evenings in Buj. we have supper on the shores of Lake Tanganyika at a beachfront restaurant. A family of hippos entertained us and some fishermen impress the hell out of us walking into the water near the hippos to place their nets then retreating and splashing the water to drive fish toward their nets.

We’re finally able to send a few messages via the internet to Marie who has gone to Halifax with Dominique’s younger daughter Anne Frederique. Our concern is that Anne Fred. might miss her mama and big sister a lot and be crying all the time. It appears it is not the case from the email we receive from Grandmaman. Soon they will be returning to Montreal by train and then driving to Dayton.



July 8 Finishing in Bujumbura and Adventure Shopping

After finishing our training we head for a high end tourist market to buy a few geegaws for friends and family. We skirt around the Central Market which can be rather intimidating with its hustle and bustle and swarms of pick pockets and thieves, beggars, and occasional revenge seekers. In 2007 after going through the market I read a section of newspaper that was used as wrapping paper for one of my purchases. It recounted a story of someone tossing a hand grenade in that market a month earlier resulting is several deaths and maimings.

We find a few things at the tourist market but really want to buy some Congolese cloth at local prices, not that of the tourist stores in the area. In a small grocery store run by a Greek lady we bemoan our plight and she provides us with some useful info about how to do what we want to do. First she advises us to leave our cameras, wristwatches, surplus money and backpacks with her. “I’ll put them in my safe. Then you must go with my employee. He’ll take you to the right place in the market and help you negotiate. But you must hurry as the market closes in 30 minutes. Cyriaque will show you the way.”

The market is a large building somewhat open air with very high ceilings and just crowded with people selling all sorts of goods from food sold by women sitting on the ground with baskets and neat stacks of produce that a pedestrian must be careful not to step on. Getting pushed by other shoppers can make walking in that area precarious. We followed Cyriaque in a tight file and weave our way through more affluent merchants with stalls stacked fifteen feet high with hardware, tools, pots, all the while stepping over beggars and crippled children placed on the ground in the most congested of areas where other children or adults watch over the money that might be dropped on the ground beside one of these diseased and wounded individuals. In the past I saw a man there with both hands cut off and when the skin healed it had retracted leaving several inches of bone exposed. He was not there on this day, but a hydrocephalic child was lying on a blanket on the ground motionless with a bowl beside it. Most of the time we were already beyond one of these poor souls before we even realized what we had just seen. We had no idea if there was any form of social services to look after them or whether this was an industry of exploitation such as portrayed in “Slumdog Millionaire”.

Without Cyriaque leading the way, we would have been swimming in a shark tank. Dominique found what she was hoping to find at a good price. Walking out of the market we came to a place where all the wet refuse and rotting produce was piled and being shoveled into a western style garbage truck. Gabrielle later said she stopped breathing at that point. We got back to the Greek lady’s store and she got our things out of a huge walk in safe and wished us a safe journey. From there we walked a few hundred yards more down the street which with the humanity around us seemed like several miles before we took a taxi down to the lakeside restaurant where we had eaten the previous night. I think we all took a deep breath when we got there realizing that only a few scraps of paper with numbers printed on them were the difference between living on a level of barely surviving to the one of luxury that we are privileged to enjoy.


July 9 Bujumbura The Lost Safari Encounters the Saturday Morning Cleanup

We bought bus tickets for 11:00AM and hire a taxi to take us to the terminus at 10:00. We learn that you can’t get a taxi before 10:30, because every Saturday Burundi citizens are expected to clean up their neighborhoods, so almost nothing is allowed to open before 10:30. Only the Kapa Boulangerie has a dispensation to open in the morning, and they have to close at noon. So not wanting to miss our bus we find a taxi parked in a gas station and hire him to take us to the terminal. It’s 10:15, and he doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to get there which makes for some nervosity on our part. He explains to us that there will be a roadblock soon that will require that he pull over and park until 10:30 when the roadblock will then be lifted. The bus departures are all scheduled to allow everyone around the city to make their departure time after the green flag drops. We get to our bus with a few minutes to spare, but so does everyone else. We must also present our passports to an internal security office before being allowed on the bus. All this because of the threat of al-Shabab in Somalia.

Our driver has a wreck in the first two hundred meters of the trip. This on the most exclusive bus service available, Belvedere. He tries to make a third lane of traffic where there is only room for two and ends up scraping another vehicle. This retards our departure for 30 minutes while matters are discussed and settled. I don’t feel like mediating with this idiot being one of the participants. Our opinion of him and his driving will deteriorate as the day goes by. He drives with reckless abandon through the mountains not slowing through villages where there are large numbers of children and pedestrians. Finally he is slowed by the Rwandans when we cross the border and it turns out he can’t produce an insurance card. That gets sorted out but when we drive through Rwanda to Kigali, he drives with extreme caution and the rules are probably much more aggressively enforced in Rwanda. We finally arrive safely in Kigali and head to the Quaker church in Kicukiro where we spend the night.

July 10
The Lost Safari Member Celebrates his 41st Anniversary Sans Spouse

We attend the Quaker service in English and learn that three people are celebrating wedding anniversaries and Dominique reminds me that this is my 41st. We are scheduled to meet Fr. Pascal Tuyisenge who is participating in Project Congo which I belong to in Dayton. I trained him in mediation two years ago in Kidaho up on the Ugandan border. He also visited Dayton this past year and we spent some time together at my workplace. This time I will train some of his parish leaders in mediation as he has found the process quite useful in his work. His parish has 11,500 members and is about an hour outside of Kigali in a village called Muhondo. It’s 11 KM off the main road and necessitates going down into a steep narrow valley and up another hill to get to the church. We travel there in the evening and don’t see the scenery very clearly but the grade of the road and the switchbacks tell us we are going down one steep long hill. We are greeted by anther priest Fr. Gandiose and three seminarians, one of whom only arrived the day before us. Also present is Jean Marie Uwitonze who works at Famly of Peace in Butare, the university town. Evelyn accompanies us from Kigali as well. She is a recent agronomy graduate and supervises some of the ag projects that Project Congo and HIP (High Impact Projects) are funding. Before getting to Muhondo we stop for beer and brochettes of goat meat which are very tasty and which Gabrielle seems to enjoy. We also have a late supper on top of the brochettes.


July 11 Muhondo on the Half Shell

We are up by 7:00. Fr. Pascal had already said mass at 6:15. I make preparations to start the three day training at 8:00 knowing full well we won’t begin before 9:00. Eugene Twizerimana is suppose to co facilitate with me. We’ve been friends from the first day I was here in 2007. Back then Eugene met me and took me by bus to Gisenyi where he facilitated a Quaker Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) workshop. He was so competent in that work and is also that way with mediation training. If there is a Rwandan who understands the process it is Eugene. Together we co-mediated an epic 7 hour mediation between two Methodist pastors in Byumba where there had been some serious squabbling resulting in a church splitting in two.

We know and like each other’s style. He arrives by bus from Kigali. I will teach in French and Eugene teaches in Kinyarwanda. Everyone is interested in this granddaughter of mine, Gabrielle, and call her Gabby. They find it unusual that a grandpa, daughter and granddaughter are travelling together.

We begin our class and are quickly joined by a schizophrenic woman who stirs up the class, but we stay calm and the participants redirect her although she comes back into the classroom many times in the next three days. She is part of the village and therefore accepted. Gabrielle stays calm in the face of this as the lady does get very disruptive. I’m constantly proud of her. Dominique really participates very actively in the class and helps translate some phrases into English for me when I’m confused. We finish at 3:30 including an hour pause for a huge lunch. Pascal has plans and take us and the other guests to the parish of Rwakuba about 45 minutes distant from here. I chat with some of the secondary students finding a few who speak English quite well. The best English speaker is named Mediatrice, and she wants to be a nurse. Wish we had more time to talk with her but we’re called to drink beer with the Fathers and the children must get into their study hour. Dominique is very funny with a bit of beer in her. Eventually the host father politely suggests that it might be time for us to begin our journey back to Muhondo and she says in French, “Oh, you’re sending us out the door. “ Alors vous nous mettez a la porte”.

July 12 Tuesday
Same routine on the second day and the crazy woman is in and out of our class, we make progress with our students and they begin doing practice mediations in front of the class using varying situations in a Rwandan setting. We put out subtle messages that maybe some of the braver students might want try to do a real case on the third day. After the class, Fr. Pascal drives us to another parish, Rulindo, the oldest around here founded in 1909 by German White Fathers in 1909 when the area was under German colonial administration. This mission at the top of a small hill overlooking a valley is quite beautiful and extensive. The cathedral can hold several thousand people. They have three business enterprises, one a dairy where milk is marketed and butter and cheese are produced and sold. The second is an apiary which produces and bottles honey. A side order product is alcohol fermented from honey which Father Honesphore proudly shares with us. It is strong, sweet and quite drinkable. After our tour, we drive back down the hill to the third enterprise, the Rulindo Centenary Bar. It was built as part of their 100th anniversary in 2009. Bottles of varying types of drink are served including Waragi a gin from Uganda which Fr. Honesphere is quite fond of. Soon very good brochettes of goat and tasty grilled potatoes in thick slices appear.

This is more than filling, but we know when we drive back to Muhondo there will be another big meal for us , served with some type of stewed meat, sauce, beans, pasta, cooked bananas, and perhaps rice along with plenty of beer and Fanta. The presence of alcohol in Catholic lives is one of the major differences between the evangelicals and the catholics The fondness for two big evening meals is also somewhat common but less so with the evangelicals as they are not in the habit of drinking when the sun goes down at 6:00PM. It’s amazing we are able to sleep after all that eating although we seem to eat more moderately than do our hosts. I also know that the average family will not eat like this. We are living in privilege while here.

July 13 A Real Mediation and Corn on the Cob

This is the third day of training in Muhondo. When we get to class we do some revision and mention is made by Eugene about doing some real mediations. It turns out the there is a small conflict between two of our class participants who both live in the village. So a mediation is organized by the members of the class. A woman who is a headmistress at the primary school will be the mediator. This is all arranged by the students without my participation. Then Eugene comes to me again and says there is another case and implies that I’ve been selected to mediate. The local government administrator whom we met yesterday has brought us a domestic violence case. Talk about pressure to demonstrate and perform what I’ve been teaching and to do it in a context of winning credibility for mediation in the community. I accept and select Jean Marie, a young journalist who works in a peace center in Butare, the National University of Rwanda town, and who has done some good translation for us to co-mediate with me. We meet the couple with the local government administrator and ask their permission to accept us as mediators which they do. The man really has little choice in the matter as he is currently under arrest.

We do this case in private, not in front of the students, because of the sensitive nature of the domestic violence and the fact that they live in a village which would negate any confidentiality in the process. When Jean Marie had done his practice mediation in front of the class , he, like new mediators will, seemed too rushed to come to a conclusion without getting to the bottom of things and stimulating positive communication between the warring parties. So part of my job was to keep a tight rein on Jean Marie, but also give him the chance to see the process slowly unfold and work. We were with the couple for an hour and a half and eventually crafted an understanding in their words which they could take home with them. They embraced quite strongly afterward and thanked us for our efforts. However I’m always wary of domestic violence cases, because they frequently recur even after peace appears to have been made. I spoke to the government administrator about my concerns, and he was not put off. He said he really wanted the matter to be settled even temporarily to get it out of his office. He said now he really saw the value of the process.

By then it was lunch time and a big lunch and closing ceremony were organized at the parish house. We ate and handed out diplomas including to Dominique and Gabrielle who was so patient as an eleven year old and sat through all 3 days of training.

After diplomas and speeches, Evelyne , one of the participants brought 20 young singers and dancers to entertain all of us. They were beautiful in all aspects and they brought us into the dancing which Gabrielle did so well with them. Finally things ended about 2:30PM. Later the school headmaster took Gabrielle and Dominique down to the school and walked them through all six grades of classrooms where they were greeted with a song in English, “We Welcome You”. The school system in Rwanda is being converted to English as the language of instruction, and this is a heavy burden on veteran teachers to make this change over from French. A lot of Ugandans are being sent in to replace those who cannot learn English quickly enough. Gabrielle and Dominique continued walking through each classroom and greeting students. All of them wanted to touch them and shake hands. The two of them reminded me of films of Princess Diana walking through the hordes of children in the Third World.

In the evening we were invited to Evelyne’s house to meet her family. Her father , Juvenal, is a big imposing man with a gentle personality. He was a member of parliament from 1968-73. He was only 27 when he first went there. He was also a teacher and headmaster and businessman in the community. Beer and soft drinks were offered and corn on the cob. This was not the kind of corn we were accustomed to eat. This was much heavier and well advanced in conversion to starch. It took me a half hour and a beer to consume one ear. Dominique and Gabrielle both managed to eat all their corn as well, a tribute to their willingness to be part of all this. We eventually walked back to the parish for the usual round of drinks and a big supper and eventually bed, although I stayed up til midnight using Fr. Pascal’s computer to check messages and do some planning for teaching on Pemba Island.


July 14 And a Happy Bastille Day to You

Fr. Pascal , has pretty much arranged everything for us since picking us up Sunday night in Kigali. Each night has been a trip somewhere. We are scheduled to fly from Kigali on the 16th, so what to do with us today and the next? He decides that we will go to Ruhengeri, the town you go to to see the mountain gorillas. We won’t however see the gorillas, because it is atrociously expensive. Instead we’ll go up near the Ugandan border to Kidaho about 10 KM from Ruhengeri and speak to some of the mediators Renee Bove and I trained in 2009. He connects us to Jean Baptiste, one of Pascal’s former classmates an IT guy at a local college. We all bundle up to Kidaho and stop at a Quaker secondary school with hopes that someone there will be able to put us in contact with some of the mediators. In the meantime we are asked to go in to meet the headmaster as a courtesy, but it seems also an interrogation. Because the schools are switching over to English as a language of instruction, I think the headmaster is anxious to demonstrate his mastery of the newly acquired language. However it seems that his only English words he can use are prepositions and conjunctions. Bizarre sentences in French connected with ‘however , because, therefore, etc’ We answer in French and a few Swahili conjunctions. We finally excuse ourselves because this is getting difficult and a bit pointless, and he seems relieved but satisfied that he can use his English effectively. His school draws students from those who didn’t do well on entrance exams, and so are classed as the dregs of the region. When he describes family problems and behavior problems, it’s as if I’m back home in Juvenile Court. Dominique and Gabrielle are asked to sit with a group of children from the ‘media club’, as they mistake our title as ‘mediators’ with ‘media pros’. Anyway while listening in I find these children to be very astute, well read, curious, and possessing a very good level of English, much better than the headmaster. In the meantime I also meet Jacques, one of my former students. He recently lost his wife to some illness and seems very sad, but when he and another colleague talk about mediation, their eyes light up and their enthusiasm abounds. They are doing about three cases a month each, and the referrals are coming from government officials. This is very encouraging and indicates that acceptance by the local authorities is there. This is what we hoped for, but we were not sure it could be accomplished. Great news!

That evening we ride a bus back down to Ruhengeri but stop first at a bar for more beer and brochettes. We stagger back to Jean Baptiste’s home to sleep, but feel a desire to get back to Muhondo where we are much more comfortable. The usual big meal is layed out and we pick through it. We somehow feel there is an ulterior motive on Jean Baptiste’s part for our being here, and we really don’t want to know what it is. We make our feelings known that we want to leave early tomorrow, and he says he will get us to the bus in the morning. However he has to teach a class from 8-10am and will come right back after that to take us to the bus. He doesn’t show up til noon. We had done a walk through the area and looked for a rehab center where Dominique might be able to talk to some occupational therapists, but that didn’t happen as the clinic was closed. That’s when we headed back to Jean Baptiste’s to wait two more hours for him to return. The television news mentions that 17 new Peace Corps Volunteers were inducted into the Rwanda program yesterday bringing the total to 135 volunteers in country working in health education and secondary education. The officialdom sitting at the ceremony appear to be a smiling bunch of overpaid functionaries with whom I would be ill at ease. Finally Jean Baptiste shows up with some American friends, and they take us to the bus station, and he calls Fr. Pascal to inform him when to meet us at the Muhondo turnoff. We finally get back to Muhondo about 5:00PM, glad to be there. But there is still another social gathering to attend, a graduation party for the primary school headmaster, Jeremy. I didn’t ask how he made headmaster without first getting his degree. However it was a lingering question. It was a nice polite affair in which there were plenty of drinks and food offered and where we sat in a circle in the main room of his house and told stories and ate and drank. In my speech I congratulated his wife for being there when he was away doing his studies and acknowledged her role in his success. We walked back in the dark under a full moon which was so bright that we could not easily see the stars and Milky Way. Hopefully by the time we get to Zanzibar the moon will have subsided and we’ll see a star filled sky.


July 16 On to Kilimanjaro, Our last day in Rwanda

We attend mass at 6:30am and are introduced and applauded by the congregation. The choir is an incredible mix of old and young voices and drums. Afterward I suggest that Fr.Pascal have someone record them and sell the CD’s of this group when he does his next mission tour. We have breakfast and then pile into the 4 passenger Suzuki that he came back with from the diocese. They needed his 7 passenger vehicle and traded him for this smaller one. With the three of us and our bags and Pascal we are really squeezed in. Apparently Evelyne is in Kigali and will meet us there to send some things with us for her sister and family who live in Chicoutomi, Quebec. One rather large picture in a frame makes that a serious challenge, but we manage. We buy a few things to take home as well and then have a quick lunch at Simba restaurant, a trendy upscale place that charges 4 times the going rate for soft drinks. Our flight is at 1:40 to Kilimanjaro via Nairobi. We want to be at the airport by noon, but Pascal takes a circuitous route from Simba to the airport to show us embassy row and various and sundry government offices. I’m getting more and more nervous as we meander through town. Finally holding in my temper I make and insistant plea to get us to the airport. We are the last ones to the check in and go through customs and immigration and get into the passenger lounge where we finally sit down to get our breaths and they announce that we should begin boarding. We make the plane by less than five minutes. It’s a smooth flight to Nairobi and I chat with a civil servant from the Burundi Ministry of Agriculture until we get to Jomo Kenyatta International. This time only a 90 minute wait for our connection and we take a smaller turbo prop Precision Air down to the Kilimanjaro Airport. A nice view of the mountain on our port side.

Dominique is sitting next to an Australian lady who is deputy director of St. Jude school in Arusha. She immediately begins recruiting Dominique , myself and Marie to come and work there. Not to teach but to mentor their teachers. And they also need an occupational therapist. Question is, are we ready? It’s a school for poor children, if they have more than a two room home, they are considered too rich to attend St. Jude. Their national test scores were second in the whole country last year, so they are doing something right.

We pay the mandatory $100 each for a 90 day visa and then another $50 for a taxi into Moshi where we will spend the night and hopefully be able to visit Sr. Daria’s parents who live on Kilimanjaro. Sr. Daria is a medical student whom we met at the University of Dayton more than 7 years ago. Marie recognized her order from her habit, the Sisters of Kilimanjaro from Marie’s days of working there in the 1960’s. Daria has put us in contact with her cousin Alphonse who is a priest in Moshi and stays at the diocese.




July 16 An Unsettling Night in Moshi but a Good Day in Arusha

As we ride into Moshi from the airport it is evident that commercial interests have layed waste to the countryside. The road is lined on both sides with bars, small hotels, markets, and small shops that were not there even a few years ago. Our driver takes us to the Kilimanjaro Native Cooperative Union (KNCU) where I used to teach business classes in 1966. It was and still is a hotel which I can no longer recommend. It’s cheap, only $15 for the three of us, but we can’t get a room with a view this night , only tomorrow night. We stow our bags in our room and since it is dark and the streets are crowded with people with whom I’m not very familiar , we head across the street to what was once the Hollywood Café, run by a Gujerati family, long departed. It is now a bar restaurant with fake palm trees and beschwipste Masaai, nursing their beers. We order hamburgers for the ladies and rice and meat (wali na nyama) for me for old times sake. The rice and meat turns out to be the winner. There is only one bun left so only one hamburger can be delivered. Dominique accepts to order chicken instead. The rice comes with beef in a sauce that can only be described as a boeuf bourgignon, clearly made with wine. I ask the waiter what is in it. It’s delicious. He says, “come early tomorrow, you can find out”. Gabrielle’s hamburger is near inedible so I switch with her. Dominique and I share three beers and I tell that I staggered home from the old Bamboo Bar which was next door to this place on many an evening when I was a peace Corps Volunteer in this town. The Bamboo Bar is gone, something is being constructed in its place.

We go back to our room and settle in to sleep but find that the street noise is amplified in our room by the architecture of the building. Being a Saturday night, it does not calm down til about 3:30AM. The old Moshi was never this way. Trucks and buses and people yelling and the bass back up in a band are going continuously. Add to the noise the diesel fumes from the bus and truck traffic and you have the recipe for an insomniac’s erotic dream. The noise stops only briefly and the traffic starts again about 5:00am. I can see that Dominique and Gabrielle are asleep but I get very little. At 8:00 we are up and go to the top floor restaurant and watch Kibo (the main peak of Kilimanjaro) come out of the clouds. We head to the cathedral for 9:30 mass and plan to meet Sr. Daria’s cousin Alphonse at 11:00 as he will take us up to her home area on the mountain (URU) to meet her parents. We meet Alphonse after the mass. He is director of Catholic education in the Moshi area, but is soon leaving for a new posting in Dar Es Salaam. He is very cordial and seems pleased to be our guide today. His mom and Daria’s mom are sisters. We visit Daria’s parents first, and Fr. Alphonse has not phoned ahead, so they are not expecting us. Dad is tending his cattle and Mom is cooking, so we sit in their dining room for awhile as they change clothes. They laughingly scold Alphonse for his neglecting to call them. Everyone has cell phones now. The mountain actually skipped the landline for the cell phone. Daria can call them quite easily from the US. We chat awhile and present them with some gifts and Daria’s mom brings us some delicious stew she had been cooking.

From there we drive on through the coffee and banana plantations to Alphonse’s mom’s. She is a widow but is such a cheerful person reminding us of Quebec hospitality, giving big hugs and kisses to everyone. Another son comes to greet us as well. He is a paramedic in Arusha about 50 miles away. After we leave Alphonse’s home we head to another parish of Holy Ghost fathers to try to make contact with a priest in Arusha who Dominique has been referred to. The fathers tell us where they have a guest house in Arusha and from there we hope to be able to book a safari to Tarangire Park to see some animals before we leave to go to Zanzibar and Pemba Islands where I’ll teach my last course on the coming weekend. Father Alphonse takes us to the Moshi bus station and gets us on an express to Arusha, a two hour ride for the fifty mile trip. There are a lot of speed bumps and traffic that slow things down. In the past there have been some terrible bus wrecks, and that is the reason for the speed bumps. We have no trouble finding the Holy Ghost guest house, and are surprised by the quality and cleanliness. It is the most expensive place we will stay at $90 a night but they give us a discount down to $75 on the second and third nights. The chef Molokai is a great cook and his soups are of an incredible standard. Every meal we have there is a surprise and it is very inexpensive. The next morning we meet a Canadian lady, Patricia, at breakfast and in our conversation ask her if she can recommend a travel agent that can put us onto a safari. She replies that she runs a travel service for the Holy Ghost fathers and can have us on safari by 10AM which she does at a very good price. I was so worried prior to this I would not be able to get Gabrielle out to a park. Dominique kept saying, “We wanna see a lion.” But I wasn’t sure this would be possible. By the end of the day it was a done deal, a reality. Patricia gave us a very good rate for a one day trip to Tarangire, a national; park which I had been in over forty years before when it was just a reserve with no amenities. We saw everything except buffaloes and giraffe up close and rhinos. We saw a leopard, my first ever, and a female lion and cubs with a wildebeeste kill. We also saw lots of elephant, zebra, waterbuck, impala, and a dik dik and rock hyrax. On the way out there were lots of Masaai cattlemen and we even saw a troop of camels. By the time we got back we were tired but content. To me I’d done all I could for Gabrielle, but there were a lot more good things to come. My biggest doubts were behind me.

July 19 The Road to Zanzibar*

*‘The Road to Zanzibar’ was the title of a film with Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and Dorothy Lamour done back in the 1940’s or early 50’s. A series of ‘Road’ films they made.

We got back to the Holy Ghost fathers’ guest house in time for supper last night with great meal that started with a ginger and carrot soup by Molokai the cook. It just kept getting better with each course. He was trained at the Bismark Institute in Dar Es Salaam. I never considered the Germans to be great chefs, but somewhere along the line, some good information got transferred to Molokai.


Next day we go out to Arusha National Park only 40 minutes away and spend a nice day seeing giraffe and buffalo up close as well as colobus monkeys. It’s an easy access park if your time is limited. It touches on Momella Lakes Lodge where John Wayne filmed “Hatari” in the early 60’s, a senseless film of capturing animals and a chance for the Duke to flex his muscles and badger his co-stars. While we are there , Patricia, our travel agent has been working on getting us tickets to fly straight to Pemba Island off the east coast. She is partly successful insomuch that we can fly to Zanzibar but will have to find our own way over to Pemba from there. We will leave tomorrow. There are a couple of small airlines that serve Pemba several times a day from Dar or Zanzibar but they aren’t on any computer link. We decided to fly to avoid the 350 mile bus ride from Arusha after experiencing the two hour ride from Moshi which is only 50 miles. Admittedly that’s probably the slowest part of the trip but we are starting to fatigue, and it will put us a good day behind our schedule to arrive a day early before the course starts. We bite the bullet on the extra cost $400 or Tanzania Shillings 591,000. I take a picture of that stack of bills.

We find that our ‘Wednesday’ tickets for Zanzibar are dated for Thursday, so Patricia goes back to work after supper to get that sorted out. She does a super job and by Wednesday morning she delivers them to us. We go to to an ATM to get money to pay for them and then have another wonderful lunch before leaving on a bus chartered by another group of visitors for the airport. The others are ten schoolboys from a Holy Ghost fathers’ school in Bensalem, PA. They’ve been here two weeks with several of their teachers including Fr. Chris McDermot who had been a priest out here for many years, Kathy Posey, their English Lit teacher and Brother Joe a philosophy teacher. They are an inspiring group of young men, and their interaction with their teachers and with us gives me great hope that there is a caring bunch of youngsters out there in the world.

Our flight to Dar and then on to Zanzibar are smooth, although as transit passengers we have to be led through a maze of corridors to re check in again and by the end of that we have been through three security checks.

This is I think my seventh time to Zanzibar. The first time was 1968 when the country re-opended with Eastern bloc style tourism after the 1963 revolution. It is still an intriguing place even with the growth of tourism. There are now a lot of high end hotels that cater to single nationalities, ie. Italians only or Germans only. I met a Norwegian dentist who somehow got sequestered in an Italian hotel, but left screaming after two days, up to his ears in pasta. Most of these tourists just go for the beaches and never see the rest of the island or Stone Town the old quarter of Zanzibar town. Admittedly Stone Town has become tacky Tourist Town where even Masai have shops to sell trinkets, but if you look hard you can still find places where the pre-tourist era is still exposed. Pemba we hope will give us a glimpse of what Zanzibar was 30 or 40 years ago.

Tonight we go to the Bandari Lodge ($45 for the three of us). We get their last room. It’s right near the port and the fish market although you can’t smell it unless you walk another fifty yards toward it. We go the other way to Fodorani Gardens on the sea front for the outdoor food vendors who all show up at sundown. On the way back to the Bandari we stop at a bar I’ve been to before. It is now dubbed ‘The Mercury’ after Freddy Mercury (remember Queen?) who was a native of Zanzibar. Soft house music and the Zanzibari young elite, all buried in their text messaging and condescending attitudes toward the wait staff.

We bought a ticket to Pemba as soon as we got off the plane at the airport. There was a ticket office for Coastal Aviation in the airport. $244 for the three of us.

Our taxi driver Mohammed Kassim is a very personable man, about 45 years old. He offers to pick us up to go to the airport next day. We accept. He will also get us when we return to Zanzibar from the Pemba trip as we hope to spend a couple of nights back here before flying home on the 27th. He will also take us on a tour of the island. I can highly recommend Mohammed if you ever come to Zanzibar. I will include his telephone number later when I find it.

July 21 Zanzibar in the Morning, Pemba by the AfternoonWe wake in the morning having digested the grilled tuna, and giant prawns and washing it down with some Kilimanjaro Lager in Freddy Mercury’s bar last night. The high Zanzibar style beds provided good sleep with the ceiling fans keeping us cool. I look out the window into a building under construction next door and see the dark side of Zanzibar. A man is lying on the floor in the unfinished construction with a tourniquet on his upper arm and a syringe and needle stuck in his forearm. A story in the paper recounts a heroin bust at a house near the airport. We meet an old man in the hotel who is a native of Zanzibar but now lives in Oman. Many people of Arab descent fled to the Emirates, Yemen, Oman and elsewhere after the revolution in 1963. The violence was directed at the Arabs who benefitted most from the Sultan’s rule. Only a few days after the British pulled out of Zanzibar, the Arabs were killed or chased out of the country, many literally into the Indian Ocean. Since the initial years of a communist style state where only the East Germans, Russians, Czechs, Chinese and a few others had representation here. The country has since liberalized its world view. The Arabs and Indians came back, although many of the older ones stayed in the Middle East. It was the younger generations who returned and set up shop. Many have gravitated toward the tourist trade which produces half the country’s revenues. The island of Pemba where I’m scheduled to teach lies about 30 miles to the north. It never went along wholly with the revolution and as a result was on the short end when development projects were created. Possibly that is not a bad thing. So there is some division within the Zanzibari house as well as a distrust between Zanzibar and the predominantly Christian mainland. Counter revoultionalry politics also evolved on th island and an opposition developed. In the early 2000’s some resistance came about on Pemba and a heavy handed response from the Zanzibari authorities took its toll with several dozen lives lost. Any legislation passed in the Tanzania Assembly that pertains to Zanzibar must have a 2/3 approval of Zanzibari representatives. The Sharia and Kadhi courts have been maintained as well. It is to the judges of these courts that I will be presenting training on mediation.

July 21.
We are up at 7:30 and have breakfast and set out to explore Stone Town , the old city before we need to go to the airport at noon. First I head to the fishing wharf but Dominique and Gabrielle refuse as the smell gets pretty strong. They say, ‘You go , Grandpa. Take some pics and come back. We’ll wait here.” After that we head to the big market which I know in advance may also challenge their sensitivities. But we make it through and stop at a few shops with intent on a good coffee, but Gabrielle convinces us to head for a sandy beach where she can put her feet in the water, so she and Dominique indulge their piscesian instincts. We get back to the hotel at 10:00 and take showers to cool off , then check out of the room. We head back to town and visit the old hospital that has been renovated and turned into a cultural center by the Aga Kahn Foundation. Then back to the Bandari where we find Mohammed is patiently waiting for us. Out to the airport where we wait an hour for our 15 passenger Cessna of Coastal Aviation. We chat with an older gentleman in Arabic dress. His English is impeccable. He was born in Zanzibar but fled at the revolution. He ended up in Oman and joined the army, recently retiring from the field artillery. He is an avid fan of American westerns and when I tell him of the visit to Momella lakes where ‘Hatari’ was filmed with John Wayne he is almost in tears. In a short time he is boarding for Muskat. We say our goodbyes.

Our plane is a 15 passenger Cessna , the pilot the only crew member. We get a quick briefing and off we go with a full view out the front window. A beautiful 30 minute flight to Pemba. Once on the ground we take a taxi to Chake Chake for Sh. 15,000, about $10 and find a room at the Clove Inn. $90 per night , air conditioned, beautiful white marble tiles, swimming pool but not much soul.

We take another taxi to the nearest beach and have a sundown swim and watch a large flock of bats flying to a rookery somewhere. We have dinner at the hotel connected to the beach and learn that a room here would be $160 per night.





July 22 We Go Exploring on Misali Island
The Mediation Training will start tomorrow. The Lonely Planet highly recommends visiting Misali Island so,we decide that today we’ll go there about 4-5 miles off Pemba. The Clove Inn calls up a tour operator who is at the hotel within twenty minutes and consummates a deal to get us there for the rest of the day. He takes us to the market to stock up on food and water, as there are no amenities on the island. We get three small loaves of bread, each of which constitutes a hoagie sized loaf of surprisingly good quality. Then we get tomatoes, and onions, some mangoes and tangerines and 3 liters of water. It’s a two hour ride out there, and I’m glad I brought some Dramamine with me as it’s a rough ride in an 18 foot wooden boat. At the island it is wonderful, the snorkeling is great, we lay in the water 50 feet from the beach and drift with the current that runs parallel to the beach. Lots of nice shell, though everything is protected here. We can pick them up , but we have to put them back. We spend five hours out there before retuning. Again I will post the name and number of our guide at the end of this blog. Our ride back is wet but uneventful. We have a meal of fried octopus, rice , chicken, chips, and mashed potatoes between the three of us.

Peter Serete our co-facilitator arrives from Kenya and Abdul our local host also meets us. We make some plans for the next day and go to bed. Peter has never taught transformative mediation. And now I think I can do it in my sleep. I trained him in interest based mediation in 2007, but his real experience is in the Quaker program Alternatives to Violence, so I sense that he is really glad that we got here as planned. Tomorrow, Dominique and Gabrielle will travel to the north end of the island with a guide. Dom. Wants to see the flying foxes (really a red furred fruit bats that live in the forest. Gabrielle just never ceases to be thrilled by everything. She has to be the easiest going 11 year old in the world. July 23 Dom and Gab are off north with our tour operator for the day ($100 for driver and car). I go with Peter to the Gombani Football Stadium about 4 miles north of town where we teach a class of 18 in one of the VIP lounges at the stadium. When they first said we were teaching at the football stadium I was wondering how many people they invited. The day goes exceedingly well for us. Hezron, the coordinator of Change Agents for Peace International (CAPI) a Norwegian Quaker NGO which sponsors this event, arrives at lunch time and we finally meet. Bridget Butt a Canadian who has headed CAPI for years, recently returned to Canada. It was Bridget who first talked about doing this training three years ago when the Quakers thought they might get back their property which had been confiscated in the revolution in 1963. A scuba diving company had had it for a number of years but CAPI was in the process of petitioning for its return. There are 18 participants including six women who are mainly social workers, there are also 6 magistrates from Sharia Courts and a Judge from the Kadhi court. A number of the magistrates are also imams from their mosques. Most speak English quite well but ask for Peter to do some translating. And he teaches his portion in Swahili although he admits that his Swahili is much less fluent than their more pure coastal Swahili. We compare Transactional and Transformative mediation and then focus on Transformative. Two years ago, Renee and I discovered that if we had people do practice mediations in front of the whole class and critique each one after it was done, they would have a fairly goo grasp of the process by the sixth mediation. I used this methodology and it still works. I told them in advance there would be many mistakes at first and it would take the bravest to volunteer to go first. They plunged in and learned by doing. They are fairly merciless in their critiquing of each other as well. I tried to put things in a positive light each time and looked for the best things, but someone always seemed to find the errors as well. Eventually some even created some new techniques as they went along. Very creative people. When I get back to the hotel with Peter , Dominique and Gabrielle are not yet back but when they do finally arrive, they have lots of stories to tell including getting vomited on by the flying ‘foxes’. They said they came across the most beautiful beach in the world but the water was full of jellyfish, so they didn’t swim. But at the north end they got up in a lighthouse and they explored Arab ruins in several places on the island.. I also learn from Peter and Hezron that they plan to pay our hotel bills and plane tickets to and from Pemba which is very nice for us as we were beginning to go over our budget.

On our flight back to the main island on Monday, Hezron who is joining us loses his ticket in his taxi, but nobody at the airport seems to mind. The four of us and one other passenger are the only people at the airport other than regular personnel. Baggage is hand inspected. No metal detectors here. They verify that Hezron is on the manifest and wave him through.

Knowing that there will only be a pilot, I ready my request to ride in the co-pilot’s seat. After my plea , the pilot says, “Climb up front.” So I tell Gabrielle to get up there. She reluctantly gets in the seat and he helps her strap in. We’re all thrilled that she gets up there. Life had been getting a little boring. The pilot is a young South African from Capetown. But we learn nothing else about him as the plane only stays on the ground in Zanzibar for a few minutes as we unload. He’s off to Dar Es Salaam by the time we’re in the terminal. Mohammed is there to meet us and we go into town to do some hotel searching. We can only find one for one night and will have to move to another on our last night in town. No worries anymore about needing to be somewhere to meet a schedule. We have a nice afternoon in Stonetown exploring. Next day Mohammed will take us on a tour of the main island. It’s off to bed staying in our first hotel with a balcony and palm trees in the garden. We’re in Stone Town rather than on the edge at the Bandari, so everything is right out the door.

Tuesday July 26 A Spice Tour and North Side of the Island.

Mohammed picks us up and 9:00 and we find a new hotel half a block away. It’s around the corner from the Supreme Court. It’s our least attractive hotel, but the owner and workers are very nice and they have the best breakfast of anyplace we’ve been to on Zanzibar. When we say Zanzibar we are really referring to a group of islands. The big island is really called Unguja even though most refer to it as Zanzibar. The place was originally inhabited by African peoples and then Persians or Shirazi people sailed down with the trade winds and stay for several hundred years. Then power shifted sporadically between Omani’s and the Portugese. Vasco Da Gama probably was the first European to see the place in the 1490’s. Ruins tend to show a lot of buildings that are both Omani and Portugese in architecture, one would build on top of the other. In the late 19th century a Sultanate was well established by Omanis, and this came under the protection of the British during the ‘Scramble for Africa’ , a competition between the Germans, British, French, and Portugese which culminated in the 1885 Treaty of Berlin when most of today’s political boundaries were drawn. In most cases these boundaries do not represent any of the tribal boundaries of the indigenous peoples of Africa. So Masai found their traditional territory straddling both Kenya and Tanganyika. An many other countries have those same problems.

Zanzibar was the center of the slave trade on the east side of Africa. The site of the Anglican Cathedral in Stone Town is where the old slave market existed. The dungeons where slaves were held before auction can still be seen under the cathedral. It is a terrifying place to see and imagine what must have gone on there. Slave routes went into the interior from Bagamoyo on the mainland. It was from here that David Livingstone went into the interior. His headquarters still exist on Unguja, though there is nothing to see in the building. It is owned by the Zanzibar Tourist Bureau, surrounded by new structures and a boat building center on the shore in front of it.

Mohammed takes us to a spice plantation which is probably not a functioning production center but it has examples of most of the spices that grow on the island from cloves, vanilla, nutmeg, mace, cinnamon, lemon grass, and jackfruit, durian, mango, papaya, coffee, lechees, and several others. There is a demonstration of tree climbing to collect coconuts, and a tasting session of the various fruits. As we leave, we see there are a number of similar centers that live off the touist trade. We head on from there to the north, as we told Mohammed we also wanted to go swimming somewhere. He takes us to the extreme northern end and wants us to see the aquarium. We reluctantly go in but are surprised to find that it is a sea turtle sanctuary and hospital. There’s a natural lagoon where turtles are protected. A young French girl is working there and shows us around. She has just arrived there from South Africa where she was working at hospital for penguins. From there we walk over to the beach and see some boat building going on and find some great shells right there. Mohammed takes us toward the Sunset hotel complex which allows non-guests onto their beach. I had stayed here in 2007. Before going to the beach he asks to stop and do prayers for a few minutes. He goes into a small mosque, washes his hands and feet before entering and does his prayers as we wait in the van. While we are waiting a young boy comes up and takes a drink from the ablution block, but no one seems to think this is a sacrilege.

Before going down to the beach we stop at a local restaurant and ask the owner for a ‘fast lunch’. He suggests tuna stir fry and it turns out to be a great choice.

The beach is long and smooth. Several more hotels have been built since 2007 , and Italian is the dominant language now being spoken. It is strange to hear the Zanzibari’s speaking this language. We have an enjoyable afternoon there and Mohammed brings us back to the hotel just before sundown. We head down to the Fodorani Gardens in time to take pictures of a magnificent sunset and have our last dinner in Africa. In the morning we do somemore shopping and Dominque and Gabrielle both get henna designs painted on their feet and hands by Bikai, a beautiful young woman who has a clothing shop in the old fort. Then we head back to the Zanzibar curio shop for a last look and a few purchases before meeting Mohammed for the trip to the airport. We make our goodbyes with him and leave a lot of our surplus clothes and other things with him. At sundown we are in the plane and on our way to London with a two hours stopover in Nairobi. We have some great experiences in London for a day and a half but I will leave that to another day to describe.

The end result of our trip is 4 mediation trainings touching about 80 people. It has been affirmed in Kigali and Bujumbura with Quaker people I’ve worked with in the past and introduced to new people in Catholic in Muhondo, Rwanda and Islamic in Chake Chake, Pemba. All places expressed a need for mediation and a desire for more training in the future. Of the 300 people I’ve trained on past trips there, they have now trained another 1700 mediators, making it over 2000 mediators developed in this program. I estimate it has cost about $12,000 to do this over the past 4 years. A pretty good bang for the buck when comparing to many other aid programs that we hear about.





8/5/

July 22-23 Exploring on Misali and Starting to Teach

July 22 We Go Exploring on Misali Island
The Mediation Training will start tomorrow. The Lonely Planet highly recommends visiting Misali Island so,we decide that today we’ll go there about 4-5 miles off Pemba. The Clove Inn calls up a tour operator who is at the hotel within twenty minutes and consummates a deal to get us there for the rest of the day. He takes us to the market to stock up on food and water, as there are no amenities on the island. We get three small loaves of bread, each of which constitutes a hoagie sized loaf of surprisingly good quality. Then we get tomatoes, and onions, some mangoes and tangerines and 3 liters of water. It’s a two hour ride out there, and I’m glad I brought some Dramamine with me as it’s a rough ride in an 18 foot wooden boat. At the island it is wonderful, the snorkeling is great, we lay in the water 50 feet from the beach and drift with the current that runs parallel to the beach. Lots of nice shell, though everything is protected here. We can pick them up , but we have to put them back. We spend five hours out there before retuning. Again I will post the name and number of our guide at the end of this blog. Our ride back is wet but uneventful. We have a meal of fried octopus, rice , chicken, chips, and mashed potatoes between the three of us.

Peter Serete our co-facilitator arrives from Kenya and Abdul our local host also meets us. We make some plans for the next day and go to bed. Peter has never taught transformative mediation. And now I think I can do it in my sleep. I trained him in interest based mediation in 2007, but his real experience is in the Quaker program Alternatives to Violence, so I sense that he is really glad that we got here as planned. Tomorrow, Dominique and Gabrielle will travel to the north end of the island with a guide. Dom. Wants to see the flying foxes (really a red furred fruit bats that live in the forest. Gabrielle just never ceases to be thrilled by everything. She has to be the easiest going 11 year old in the world. July 23 Dom and Gab are off north with our tour operator for the day ($100 for driver and car). I go with Peter to the Gombani Football Stadium about 4 miles north of town where we teach a class of 18 in one of the VIP lounges at the stadium. When they first said we were teaching at the football stadium I was wondering how many people they invited. The day goes exceedingly well for us. Hezron, the coordinator of Change Agents for Peace International (CAPI) a Norwegian Quaker NGO which sponsors this event, arrives at lunch time and we finally meet. Bridget Butt a Canadian who has headed CAPI for years, recently returned to Canada. It was Bridget who first talked about doing this training three years ago when the Quakers thought they might get back their property which had been confiscated in the revolution in 1963. A scuba diving company had had it for a number of years but CAPI was in the process of petitioning for its return. There are 18 participants including six women who are mainly social workers, there are also 6 magistrates from Sharia Courts and a Judge from the Kadhi court. A number of the magistrates are also imams from their mosques. Most speak English quite well but ask for Peter to do some translating. And he teaches his portion in Swahili although he admits that his Swahili is much less fluent than their more pure coastal Swahili. We compare Transactional and Transformative mediation and then focus on Transformative. Two years ago, Renee and I discovered that if we had people do practice mediations in front of the whole class and critique each one after it was done, they would have a fairly goo grasp of the process by the sixth mediation. I used this methodology and it still works. I told them in advance there would be many mistakes at first and it would take the bravest to volunteer to go first. They plunged in and learned by doing. They are fairly merciless in their critiquing of each other as well. I tried to put things in a positive light each time and looked for the best things, but someone always seemed to find the errors as well. Eventually some even created some new techniques as they went along. Very creative people. When I get back to the hotel with Peter , Dominique and Gabrielle are not yet back but when they do finally arrive, they have lots of stories to tell including getting vomited on by the flying ‘foxes’. They said they came across the most beautiful beach in the world but the water was full of jellyfish, so they didn’t swim. But at the north end they got up in a lighthouse and they explored Arab ruins in several places on the island.. I also learn from Peter and Hezron that they plan to pay our hotel bills and plane tickets to and from Pemba which is very nice for us as we were beginning to go over our budget.

On our flight back to the main island on Monday, Hezron who is joining us loses his ticket in his taxi, but nobody at the airport seems to mind. The four of us and one other passenger are the only people at the airport other than regular personnel. Baggage is hand inspected. No metal detectors here. They verify that Hezron is on the manifest and wave him through.

Knowing that there will only be a pilot, I ready my request to ride in the co-pilot’s seat. After my plea , the pilot says, “Climb up front.” So I tell Gabrielle to get up there. She reluctantly gets in the seat and he helps her strap in. We’re all thrilled that she gets up there. Life had been getting a little boring. The pilot is a young South African from Capetown. But we learn nothing else about him as the plane only stays on the ground in Zanzibar for a few minutes as we unload. He’s off to Dar Es Salaam by the time we’re in the terminal. Mohammed is there to meet us and we go into town to do some hotel searching. We can only find one for one night and will have to move to another on our last night in town. No worries anymore about needing to be somewhere to meet a schedule. We have a nice afternoon in Stonetown exploring. Next day Mohammed will take us on a tour of the main island. It’s off to bed staying in our first hotel with a balcony and palm trees in the garden. We’re in Stone Town rather than on the edge at the Bandari, so everything is right out the door.

Tuesday July 26 A Spice Tour and North Side of the Island.

Mohammed picks us up and 9:00 and we find a new hotel half a block away. It’s around the corner from the Supreme Court. It’s our least attractive hotel, but the owner and workers are very nice and they have the best breakfast of anyplace we’ve been to on Zanzibar. When we say Zanzibar we are really referring to a group of islands. The big island is really called Unguja even though most refer to it as Zanzibar. The place was originally inhabited by African peoples and then Persians or Shirazi people sailed down with the trade winds and stay for several hundred years. Then power shifted sporadically between Omani’s and the Portugese. Vasco Da Gama probably was the first European to see the place in the 1490’s. Ruins tend to show a lot of buildings that are both Omani and Portugese in architecture, one would build on top of the other. In the late 19th century a Sultanate was well established by Omanis, and this came under the protection of the British during the ‘Scramble for Africa’ , a competition between the Germans, British, French, and Portugese which culminated in the 1885 Treaty of Berlin when most of today’s political boundaries were drawn. In most cases these boundaries do not represent any of the tribal boundaries of the indigenous peoples of Africa. So Masai found their traditional territory straddling both Kenya and Tanganyika. An many other countries have those same problems.

Zanzibar was the center of the slave trade on the east side of Africa. The site of the Anglican Cathedral in Stone Town is where the old slave market existed. The dungeons where slaves were held before auction can still be seen under the cathedral. It is a terrifying place to see and imagine what must have gone on there. Slave routes went into the interior from Bagamoyo on the mainland. It was from here that David Livingstone went into the interior. His headquarters still exist on Unguja, though there is nothing to see in the building. It is owned by the Zanzibar Tourist Bureau, surrounded by new structures and a boat building center on the shore in front of it.

Mohammed takes us to a spice plantation which is probably not a functioning production center but it has examples of most of the spices that grow on the island from cloves, vanilla, nutmeg, mace, cinnamon, lemon grass, and jackfruit, durian, mango, papaya, coffee, lechees, and several others. There is a demonstration of tree climbing to collect coconuts, and a tasting session of the various fruits. As we leave, we see there are a number of similar centers that live off the touist trade. We head on from there to the north, as we told Mohammed we also wanted to go swimming somewhere. He takes us to the extreme northern end and wants us to see the aquarium. We reluctantly go in but are surprised to find that it is a sea turtle sanctuary and hospital. There’s a natural lagoon where turtles are protected. A young French girl is working there and shows us around. She has just arrived there from South Africa where she was working at hospital for penguins. From there we walk over to the beach and see some boat building going on and find some great shells right there. Mohammed takes us toward the Sunset hotel complex which allows non-guests onto their beach. I had stayed here in 2007. Before going to the beach he asks to stop and do prayers for a few minutes. He goes into a small mosque, washes his hands and feet before entering and does his prayers as we wait in the van. While we are waiting a young boy comes up and takes a drink from the ablution block, but no one seems to think this is a sacrilege.

Before going down to the beach we stop at a local restaurant and ask the owner for a ‘fast lunch’. He suggests tuna stir fry and it turns out to be a great choice.

The beach is long and smooth. Several more hotels have been built since 2007 , and Italian is the dominant language now being spoken. It is strange to hear the Zanzibari’s speaking this language. We have an enjoyable afternoon there and Mohammed brings us back to the hotel just before sundown. We head down to the Fodorani Gardens in time to take pictures of a magnificent sunset and have our last dinner in Africa. In the morning we do somemore shopping and Dominque and Gabrielle both get henna designs painted on their feet and hands by Bikai, a beautiful young woman who has a clothing shop in the old fort. Then we head back to the Zanzibar curio shop for a last look and a few purchases before meeting Mohammed for the trip to the airport. We make our goodbyes with him and leave a lot of our surplus clothes and other things with him. At sundown we are in the plane and on our way to London with a two hours stopover in Nairobi. We have some great experiences in London for a day and a half but I will leave that to another day to describe.

The end result of our trip is 4 mediation trainings touching about 80 people. It has been affirmed in Kigali and Bujumbura with Quaker people I’ve worked with in the past and introduced to new people in Catholic in Muhondo, Rwanda and Islamic in Chake Chake, Pemba. All places expressed a need for mediation and a desire for more training in the future. Of the 300 people I’ve trained on past trips there, they have now trained another 1700 mediators, making it over 2000 mediators developed in this program. I estimate it has cost about $12,000 to do this over the past 4 years. A pretty good bang for the buck when comparing to many other aid programs that we hear about.





8/5/
July 24 Sunday Finishing TrainingI complete training with Peter, showing people the techniques of transformative mediation with deep listening and using the caucus , and learning to be very patient. Their role playing is superb and I’ve taken notes on the subjects the chose to mediate. I’ll present these later. Dominique and Gabrielle go to mass in the morning and come to my class for the last hour. One of the ladies asks Gabrielle to help pass out the certificates. The women do not shake hands with me but do with Gabrielle. The opposite goes for the men. They shake my hand but do not touch Gabrielle. All the women are covered including a form of hijab. On the island some are veiled except for the eyes. I met an old Irishman on th street last night. He lived here form 1984-89, Jack O’Donavan. He says back then no woman was veiled but most are now. Our hotel manager is not veiled but it turns out that she is from Arusha and is Catholic as she takes Dominque and Gabrielle to mass this morning. After the class we ride a local bus, dalla dalla, to see the former Quaker property. The old sign Swahili Divers is still on the two story building. The church or meeting house stands separately and has a sign saying it was built in 1959. Since getting access to the property , two Quaker pastors have been here but have not found any former Quakers now living, and they have not been successful at getting anything going in the terms of a mission. It is now rented out to another Christian group, Assembly of God.Hezron is able to get tickets today for us to leave at noon tomorrow.