In this show we will be mainly in Africa; Zanzibar to be more exact. We’ll be hearing about people’s relationships with animals in Zanzibar. And about how football is played differently in the UK, US and Africa. Mostly we’ll be hearing from Christine Atkinson who now lives in Zanzibar and how she ended up getting a job with social enterprise, Chako.
absolutely sustainable
As part of my work in European projects I have been helping to develop and pilot a course for teachers to help their students develop a sustainable mindset. Having developed the course, we wanted to try it out, so at the end of 2017 we invited people to join us for a free pilot. In fact, we attracted a much wider range of people than we had anticipated, both in terms of geography and professional background. One of those people was Christine Atkinson, an American who has recently settled in Zanzibar. The pilot course was blended which means that there were face to face elements and online elements, so having first met Christine in Vienna in February, I met up with her again in June in Finland for the last module of the course having followed her amazing story as the course unfolded online in the intervening months. So let’s hear why Christine now lives in Zanzibar and how she ended up getting a job with social enterprise, Chako.
We have posted some examples of the products that Christine’s new employer, Chako, produce on this page. And by the way Chako means Yours in Swahili so that is a way of bringing home to people that the company is about returning to tourists the garbage that they produce, otherwise known as the Tourist2tourist approach. We’ll be hearing more from Christine later in the show but for now I want to move onto the topic of football, or soccer as Americans call it.
absolutely foul
You may remember that I spoke to Irishman Joe Kearns in show 227 to find out how he got into the intercultural field. As we were talking during the run-up to the World Cup Joe started talking about cultural differences he had noticed about football playing on different continents so let’s go absolutely foul!
Now that all makes sense to me! I will certainly be looking at football with a different perspective from now on as a result of that conversation.
absolutely sentimental
In our final segment I will return to Christine, who began talking about the role of animals in Zanzibar compared to the US. This was all prompted by the fact that as part of the Prof E Sus course we had asked our participants to plan for, and try out a zero-waste week. When Christine started to talk about that 80% of landfill in Zanzibar is food, I wondered why the food was not fed to animals. According to Christine that would be absolutely too sentimental!
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Our next show will be coming to you from Laurent Borgmann in Germany on 5th October.
Until then – stay tuned!
The host of this show is: Anne Fox
