Online newspapers keep overseas Tanzanians in touch

After a scenic five hour drive from Toronto earlier today, the Capital City of Canada, Ottawa offers a nice blend of hospitality with friendly locals keen to tell you, in their French accent, why this is a good place to have a short holiday.  Ottawa is also the home to the federal government and is well known for its institutions of higher learning, in particular Carleton and Ottawa Universities the former of which is known for its excellence in journalism, international affairs and architecture.

The seaplane tours, narrated city bus tours, boat cruises, canoes and kayak trips, museums, large screen Imax theatres, the largest natural caves in Canada dating back to 12,000 to 20,000 years and the hot air balloon rides and skating in winter are some of the local attractions. There is also the breath-taking amphi-bus tour where you start a city tour in a bus that converts itself into a boat for a cruise on the beautiful Ottawa River.

As in other major tourist areas of Canada, Ottawa offers visitors a large variety of dining facilities ranging from Belgian, Canadian, European, Indian, Pakistani, French, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Lebanese, Moroccan, Spanish, Turkish and Thai specialties. A complimentary copy of a book guide informing tourists on important ongoing activities is available in all major hotels and the tourist information center.

When I mention Tanzania to locals here, surprisingly a good number still do not know where we are located on the world map. I know this was the case a few years ago but honestly expected that Tanzania would be better known today. This lack of awareness either means that geography teachers here are not doing their job well or that Tanzania and its people need to do more to make the world know of our existence on the east coast of Africa.

As a child I do vividly recollect the times when our athletes, particularly our runners, earned glories at the Olympics or the Commonwealth Games thereby enlightening people world-wide about the country. The subsequent lull in our sporting achievements and ironically the fact that Tanzania has been among the most peaceful countries in Africa, has presumably made the country and its people less known to citizens of distant countries.

When undergoing a routine stress test here, the doctor taking the test asked me more about Tanzania as I ran on the treadmill. Normally I hate talking when using a treadmill but in this case I presumed that the doctor was probably gauging my performance by verifying on my ability to converse while the speed of the treadmill was gradually increased.  When I informed him that Tanzania is in East Africa, he asked if we were next to Uganda, a country that he first heard about through the atrocities of Idi Amin. He knew of a poor neighbouring country that had a small war to oust Amin and I told him that Tanzania is this neighbouring country. Strange ways of how people learn first about a country!

On television and in local newspapers there is very little on Tanzania, the exception being a few tourism documentaries on the travel channel. Just yesterday morning I saw part of an interesting documentary on Zanzibar and there have been similar documentaries on also the country’s game reserves.

Some of the Tanzanians who have settled here or are pursuing further education get more information on the country through Tanzania newspaper websites. Some actively contribute their thoughts to local Tanzanian newspapers by e-mails or through online discussions hosted by web moderators.

As a visitor it is a great feeling to be able to read Tanzanian newspapers through the Internet as this keeps one updated with events back home. For businessmen traveling out of Tanzania newspaper websites offer an added advantage of enabling them to keep track on currency fluctuations, economic affairs or political enactments and the like.

Tanzania newspaper web sites are expected to become increasingly popular among Tanzanians overseas. This is why newspaper web teams need to put in more effort to make their sites more user friendly and also to ensure that those who miss an online copy on any particular day can do so by having access to archived copies, dating back to say 30 days or even longer. The need for archived copies is even more relevant for Tanzania because when our local servers are down, it is not possible for a surfer to get online access to a local web site.