Everybody travels with a digital camera these days.
Digital photographers face a couple of problems, however. One is that your memory cards get full half way through your holiday no matter how many gigabytes of storage you brought. Second, going digital has just aggravated the old problem of finding an audience for those 10,000 holiday picts that no longer lie around in shoe-boxes but take up space on your computer hard drives.
Here at Maweni we now offer guests to store away their photos on CD or DVD so that they can empty their memory card and start afresh. All we ask for in return is that they share their bests shots in our guest albums. They get their own photo album on the site and can email the url to friends back home. Then, when they come home, and ask their friends if they want to see the pictures, their friends can get away with claiming that they've already seen them on the web.
But seriously now, these pictures are good and very interesting. There are no random snapshots, there's always an idea, conscious or subconscious, behind a photograph. I work with pictures every day, and I can't help reflecting on the camera's gaze. What does the world look like for that person? What made her see that motive, lift the camera and take the picture? These guest albums show what people did when they were here, and reflect how different people experience the same environment in different ways.
Rosemary and Helen, who work for UN and DFID in Iraq, came by and ran into the team working on our next documentary. One would think that someone who is on holiday from war-torn Iraq would not want to hear our depressing stories of tanzanian social problems, drugs, aids and poverty, and our whining about the general failure of the development agencies to address them. But these women didn't go "HA, you think Tanzania is in a mess!!!" No, they wanted to hear it all, they watched the film, listened to the stories with empathy, and did not find our problems petty. They were the most inspiring discussion partners. They described a sense of freedom they had in Tanzania. That people would touch each other here. The absence of threat in our perfect garden.
Then came
Toby and Birgit, with another way of seeing. They are from Austria (or more specifically from Vienna, as the people of this old civilization are quick to point out so that we should not confuse them with the ski bums and shepherds who make up the other half of the population). Toby left a set of really beautiful close ups, of plants and creatures, colours and textures, things that we pass every so often without actually
seeing. We found these pictures on the screen after dinner one day, and everybody went Ohh! and Ahh! and got terribly inspired to take more pictures.
Like young
Finn and the Houstons, who went trekking to Mtae, and came back with pictures of rain and mud, and Sambaa people at work: Nuns with patients at a rural clinic, women making pots, roasting coffee, and, showing the most spectacular of livelihoods here, a medicin man at work, drumming and trance-dancing for the spirits. One may think it is easy to take such simple pictures of colourful people. But when you do not know the language it takes an attitude of openness and curiosity to establish the kind of relationship that makes it possible to lift the camera and get a picture that does not feel awkward.
Then there is
Klaus' bird shots. His project is to list and illustrate every bird species that frequents Maweni's garden (if you think that is easy, take a look at
the checklist over at
Birdman). Most of these images are video frame grabs, meaning that they are chosen from a 25 frames-per-second video clip. Resolution is not as good as with a normal camera, but the ability to chose the moment gives the images a special quality. Thanks to these pictures, everybody here starts to
see the birds and take interest in birding. This is wonderful, we encourage all forms of interest in nature. The only problem is that guests now expect
me to tell them what species they see. There is much more to come from Klaus, he is capturing and sorting the pictures back in Germany.
Tommy from Sweden came with James-the-birdman, with fresh pictures from Mazumbai. It's not easy to get shots of birds in that forest -- actually it is very difficult to get any shots at all, since the forest floor is extremely dark even at noon on a sunny day (like 1/15th of a second, aperture 2.8, ISO 400 ). I just love the body language of that colobous monkey, this one must be the manager, the guy who runs Mazumbai. I convinced Tommy to throw in a selection of pictures from the rest of his Tanzania journey as well. Don't miss the one from Uhuru peak in heavy snowfall. Brrr. The funny looking monkey with the lack of hairstyle is a red colobous from Zanzibar.
Finally, yesterday,
Glen and Valery, from another beautiful northern tanzanian lodge,
Karama came to see us. Their pictures reveal what they saw: the new solar power backup and the fool-proof internet connection. Is that a tourist attraction? Maybe not, but trust me, if you had ever tried to run a business in rural Tanzania you would see the beauty in those pictures.
