Arrival
in Mombasa
Dear People,
Sorry for the long silence. Things are going well here in Afrika.
Next two weeks an interesting period with collecting info on livelihood
and conservation. Hope everything is going well.
Best wishes,
Sander
Lieve mensen
Arrival in mombasa
After
my 10 days in Nairobi I arrived on the 24th of February in Mombasa
with a national flight with Kenia airways. Right away I noticed
that that the atmosphere was completely different. It was much
warmer and things went slower. A large part of the Mombasa population
is Indian and Arabic. Many people are Muslim so five times a
day you hear the singing from the speakers. The first taxi I
took in Mombasa didn‚t have a taxi licence so when we were
stopped by a police officer a little bribe had to be given.
A few minutes after reaching my hotel I contacted Georgia who
is the Kenyan coastal province officer for WWF. However she was
not able to meet me that afternoon so I went to discover the streets
of Mombasa on my own. First I check with the receptionist if there
were areas I should not go but she assured me that Mombasa was
very safe. I walk towards one of the old fortress that was put
there by the Portuguese a few centuries ago to defend their trading
post. Around the fortress the old city with narrow streets and
beautiful Arabic-Swahili buildings with woodcarvings on the doors.
I discovered an alley that can out to the sea. A group of local
people were enjoying the beautiful view while drinking strong sweet
coffee out of small cups. I just sat there for a few hours looking
out over the sea and talking a little about Mombasa with the owner
of the coffee stand.
Ukunda
A few days later I went to Ukunda which is south of Mombasa and
my main base during the time I am in Kenya. To leave Mombasa you
have to cross the sea entrance to the harbour by ferry. Cars have
to pay a small amount to cross but pedestrians can cross for free.
Many people that work in Mombasa cross by this ferry every day
so although there are three ferries in operation at all time it
is very crowed on every one of them. An hour from the ferry is
the town of Ukunda, which owns is existence mostly because of the
tourist beach area that is close to the town.
The
first days in Ukunda I didn‚t feel good. The heat was
to much for me and my stomach had not adjusted to the local bacterial
fauna that was found on the local food. Still I was taken to many
places to meet the important partners of the WWF landscape project
like the heads of the Forest Department and the Kenyan Wildlife
Service. The goal of my internship is to design a landscape-tracking
tool by finding the right indicators and collecting information
for those indicators. The first few weeks I really didn‚t
have any idea how I could ever capture so many aspects of such
a large area. Later I found out that I should focus on existing
information form the government and other organisations and bring
that together.
Resaerch
After an initial search for secondary data on indicators
many
stakeholders suggested that fieldwork is also needed to get a more
current idea of the situation on the ground and to collect information
on missing indicators.
Therefore I decided to focus on 4 localities around Shimba hills
to do a household questionnaire (please find attached the English
and the Swahilli draft versions). Most indicators are included
in the questionnaire even a biodiversity aspect.
Per locality four villages will be selected two close to the Shimba
reserve border and two about 5 km away from the forest. Per village
about 12 questionnaires will be collected. 12*16 villages = 192
questionnaires. In 10 days of field work that will mean about 20
questionnaires per day. There will be 4 teams and each team will
collect 5 quest. per day.
This
fieldwork will be done in cooperation with one volunteer from
a local CBO from each locality, a professional enumerator from
the Central Bureau of Statistics and the village chiefs. At the
moment we have also closely involved Plan International and the
divisional officer. Next Wednesday the 19th of April I have organised
a meeting/workshop with several parties involved to introduce
and discuss the questionnaire that will be used for during this
fieldwork in Kubo division
