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.