Celebration time at the Arusha tovuti training

Mambo from Arusha, the busy commercial and diplomatic town in northern Tanzania at the foot of the 4,500 metre high Mount Meru. Arusha is the bustling hub of tourism in the country, situated neatly on the way to the Serengeti National Park and the Ngorongoro Crater, both world-famous for their wildlife. The town is also the local capital of nyama choma, barbequed grilled meat, so popular here that after sunset you can feel the smell of charcoal in almost every street corner.

But Arusha also hosts the headquarters of the East African Community (EAC), a regional economic union of Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and nowadays also Rwanda and Burundi. The Arusha International Conference Centre just outside the city centre has also been the venue for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, a UN court trying to bring justice to victims of the genocide in 1994.

This is now the place where we are conducting a one-week training course for local journalists in the use of internet, tovuti in Kiswahili, for fact-finding, news monitoring, communication and publication. The training is organized jointly by MISA-Tanzania and VIKES Foundation, a solidarity organization of journalist associations in Finland.

There are altogether 19 participants in the training. Nine of them are from Arusha itself, four come from neighbouring Moshi, three are from Manyara in the wide Masailand south from here, and two journalists have come with the bus all the way from Tanga on the north Tanzanian coast. Add to that as well the information officer of MISA-Tanzania, who is also the correspondent of IPS News in Dar es Salaam.

Most of the participants are reporters and correspondents of national mainstream newspapers, but there’s also a TV reporter from the national ITV channel and five radio journalists from local private FM channels, one of them from a community radio in Manyara.

We have now soon spent the first day of the training in a computer room at UCC Arusha, Summit Centre, Sokoine Road. The abbreviation stands for University of Dar es Salaam Computing Centre Arusha Branch.

The speed of the network was a bit slow today, so we didn’t really manage to do everything that was on the agenda. But at least we got started, learned to know each others, and visited a number of websites that have in one way or another changed the world in the quite recent era of internet. We searched the location of the venue from Google maps, we have seen what Americans buy from eBay, we edited the section about Tanzanian media in the Wikipedia online encyclopaedia, and also did an exercise on how to buy a train ticket in Finland from my hometown Helsinki to Turku.

The last one was to show how people in the so called developed countries use many services through the internet.

At the end of the day, there was a mood of celebration when most of the participants managed to open their own blogs. I will provide links kesho.