Nice

Likely related to yesterday’s public holiday, celebrating the agricultural backbone of the country, the night was filled with random music and antics on a loudspeaker. It continued until the early hours and the challenge was to tune it out to a level which permitted sleep. Despite this I woke feeling more refreshed than usual. There is no telling what the body is doing. Even though my neighbourhood is largely peaceful, I always have to be on the lookout for unpredictable loud nighttime events nearby.

At lunchtime Dennis and I were served by a woman with a name badge displaying her name as Nice. She was indeed very pleasant and was so eager to serve us that she approached and waited by the car as we pulled up. It made our lunch enjoyable and we washed things down with a tasty glass of sugar cane juice. In the evening, in a quest to expand my social circle, I hung out with my new Ugandan friend and we exchanged tales about travel and life in Tanzania as foreigners.

My attention was drawn to this jar of honey in the supermarket. For a few years I’ve been working with some collaborators to scope a honey enterprise idea in the dominant miombo woodland habitat of southern Tanzania and northern Mozambique. I’ve recently secured some funding that will allow us to move ahead and develop something that will have both social and ecological benefits. This company has already got an enterprise off the ground, and they’ve done a nice job with the branding. In the coming months I might be back at the supermarket doing ‘market research’ with a notebook and camera.