Chapter closed

A trip to Dar Es Salaam awaits me on Monday, followed by an anticipated foray to Zanzibar. Unless some unforeseen disaster – which I've been getting increasingly paranoid about – awaits me. As if to bait my anxiety, I just learned from Lema that the bus company who I bought a ticket from suspended their services on Friday, after a death in the management's family. If they are operating on Monday I should be OK, otherwise I'll have to attempt to go with a different company at the last minute. Annoying (and weird that an entire company stops business because of non-employee's funeral), but I'll have to wait and see.

As I've mentioned many times previously, this Zanzibar trip essentially represents the end of my volunteering experience here. For the first few weeks of this experience, I was feeling a little down – perhaps pessimistic – about what I could realistically achieve. I resolved to do what I could in the time I had, with a basic target of making a little money for the mamas, and an ideal target of creating a solid and contingent business for them. With the shared efforts of my volunteering partner Robin, I believe we've achieved that ideal.

In brief, here's what we've gotten done:

• Selected a pair of product types (coasters and bracelets) that were suitable to serve as gifts for a safari company to give to clients.
• Refined and improved both products (made smaller, easier to make, more consistent in size, shape and style)
• Designed marketing materials to promote business to safari companies.
• Created packaging arrangement for products (labels tied onto individual coasters and bracelets with a fancy bow, courtesy of Robin)
• Divided prospective earnings into three categories (wages, expenses, Educare overhead)
• Approached three safari companies (Access 2 Tanzania, Massai Wanderings and Tropical Trails)
• Sold trial pack (15 coasters and 15 bracelets @ 75,000 Tsh) to Massai Wanderings.
• Sold first regular pack (15 coasters and 15 bracelets @ 90,000 Tsh) to Massai Wanderings. Successfully entered into regular business agreement.

While the list is modest, I'm happy with it after two months' work. As you would expect, it leaves out the plethora of the tiny details, miscellaneous complications and daily grinds that came up along the way. Getting a printer, finding ink, trekking out to the middle of nowhere to find safari companies, learning how to make the products, explaining business procedures in limited English translation, selecting the best products, making countless early-morning daladala trips, creating work records, etc, etc.

I'm sure that teaching English, building schools, looking after children or other such activities would have provided an extremely enriching experience; but for me, doing something out of my comfort zone professionally-speaking was an alien task in itself and thus rewarding in a special way.

In short, I have not saved the African people (as I clearly set out to do), but I do feel like I've done something helpful for a small group of women, and thus their families too. Naturally, the whole shebang could fall apart if, for whatever reason, the business is not able to continue – but I have to accept that certain things are out of my hands once I am gone.

Following a post-Zanzibar update, then, I think that this blog will shortly be coming to an end. Writing it has been a nice way to flex my braincells, as well as document memories I'll look back upon fondly in twenty years, when my beaver-tail coaster business is thriving in the trendy boutiques of Toronto.

(Actually, I think I'll survive happily if I never have to market jewellery or household goods again in my life).