Community – Page 4

Sudan: School Grounds Brew Home Grown Games

Local school grounds in Sudan are a breeding pool for home grown games. The most popular seems to use any pole available, including those against walls, string & a soda bottle filled with rocks and dirt. Voila, you have a tetherball game at hand. About the only thing not found just laying around is the string and oddly enough that’s what needs to be replaced often, as can be seen by the photo with the variations in colored string.

[Editors note: these pictures were taken during a sand storm]

Another home grown game seems to bear some resemblance to cricket. They throw a small rubber ball at another person who tries to kick it. If they are successful they run between two pre-determined locations, stacking rocks/stones/bricks at each point, until the other team can return the ball to try and hit them with it.

Oddly enough, it seems volleyball is another popular sport. I know of at least four schools which have installed volleyball nets

(This story is from Taylor Martyn, a photographer and missionary in Southern Sudan.)

Car Batteries and LEDs in Mali

Matt Berg has put together a wonderful photo montage on how LEDs and 12v batteries are changing the face of connectivity and cheap lighting in Mali. Reproduced here with his permission are the images from the (large) PDF.

“The mass market solution (LED + small rechargeable battery + 1 W solar panel) that will really make a difference will be Chinese and at a price that will encourage extremely fast adoption rates.”

“Used car batteries you can see are the “power lines” in a lot of African villages that form the basis of distributed power distribution.”

Ancient fishing rafts in Lake Baringo

The Il Chamus or Njemps tribe still exist as they did thousands of years ago fishing in the spectacular lake Baringo using a hand made rafts made of reeds….not a new invention but still something very innovative and obviously successful otherwise it would have been abandoned centuries ago. They are unique people, though linguistically related to the Masai and Samburu, they have broken from tradition and also fish which is taboo among the Maasai tribes who will not even touch let alone eat fish.

Il Chamus (Njemps) Fisherman in traditional reed boat

The raft is made from reeds called ambatch harvested from the shores of the lake and it takes only a day to build one. The balsa wood reeds are strung together and tied using sisal fibres and paddles are traditionally made from planks of hand sized planks of wood. Today most fishermen used plastic pieces cut from used jerry cans. The rafts last for over a year and though they look flimsy and unstable, they are well adapted to the lake which is very flat and calm. How but how they escape from the hundreds of hippos is anyones guess.

Living on the islands in the middle of Lake Bogoria boats are critical or the survival of the Il Chamus. Each boat seems to be one man outfit and men have carved out territories on the lake in which they fish. Each fisherman works in the early morning hours and using line and nets, he catches a variety of small carps and lungfish for home and sale to passing people. In a day one man can catch only a handful of fish and will earn about US $1.50 through sales. The Il Chamus are one of a handful of tribes left in the world that use this kind of traditional method of fishing.

To preserve fish they are smoked in traditional smoking houses. Fish are laid on top of the wire mesh and smouldering charcoal from wood of various indigenous species of trees are placed in the entrance.

Njemps village on an island in Lake Baringo

Il Chamus are agro pastoralists and still live a very basic lives. They move their livestock from islands to mainland – but their rafts can carry goats and sheep but not cattle so they simply drive cows into the water forcing them to swim across the lake, which is 8 m deep. The herd is guided them from rafts.

If you live in Kenya and haven’t been out to Lake Baringo – you are missing an amazing piece of living pre-history.

There’s hardly any information available online on this amazing tribe – if you have any or know where to find more information please let me know.

Turkana zipper head dresses

While visiting a rural community in the dry bushlands of Elementata I met some Turkana women who were absolutely captivating

Did you notice the creative head dresses? Zippers may have been invented in USA but nobody would have imagined they’d be used for head dresses. I was so awed by the outfits that I forgot to ask where they got all those zippers from – I can’t get rid of the image of all the village men wondering about with gaping flies.

Liberia’s Blackboard Blogger

Alfred Sirleaf is an analog blogger. He take runs the “Daily News”, a news hut by the side of a major road in the middle of Monrovia. He started it a number of years ago, stating that he wanted to get news into the hands of those who couldn’t afford newspapers, in the language that they could understand.

Alfred serves as a reminder to the rest of us, that simple is often better, just because it works. The lack of electricity never throws him off. The lack of funding means he’s creative in ways that he recruits people from around the city and country to report news to him. He uses his cell phone as the major point of connection between him and the 10,000 (he says) that read his blackboard daily.

Liberia’s Blackboard Blogger from WhiteAfrican on Vimeo.

Not all Liberians who read his news are literate, so he makes use of symbols. Whether it’s a UN or military helmet, a poster of a soccer player or a bottle of colored water to denote gas prices, he is determined to get the message out in any way that he can.

Advertising works here too. It’s $5 to be on the bottom level, $10 to be on the sideboard and $25 on the main section. He doesn’t get a lot of advertising, and but he manages to scrape by.

His plans for the future include decentralizing his work, this means opening up identical locations in other parts of Monrovia, and in a few of the larger cities around the country. I don’t put it past Alfred either, he’s a scrappy entrepreneur on a mission to bring information and news to ordinary Liberians. He’s succeeded thus far, and I would put my money on him growing it even further.

(Also, read the NYT piece on him from 3 years ago)

(note: title for this post stolen shamelessly from Rebecca’s Pocket. I also first posted this at WhiteAfrican, because I couldn’t decide if it was an AfriGadget story or not…)