I am back in Dar es Salaam, there is nothing that prepares you for the heat.  The shift from 9 degrees Celsius to 25 degrees is such a shock to my system. But I am also beginning to realise just how fast my body is adjusting to the heat of Dar es Salaam, I can sit in a room without a fan or AC on, in some cases when it is on I start to feel cold.

The workload is intense and leaves my mind spinning at the end of every day. I love the new challenge, I love being able to build up from scratch and employ what I call my triage of storytelling. The writing and training are relentless with a gorgeous view to boot.

In normal circumstances, someone in my position would be losing their mind. I am loving it, I am thriving because, for the first time in a super long time, I feel like all my faculties are in use, the challenge for me is to read much much more. There’s where I need to catch up, I need to find a way to engage my mind. Since I am actively updating a social media account, I am choosing to spend time reading articles from tweets and Facebook updates to start feeding the reading gap. As I also learn to ensure there is personal writing time.

While I was a journalist one of my hugest frustrations was I felt my stories never had an impact. I wrote them, so what? I would occasionally get the “your story inspired me” email from people but that didn’t serve much as an inspiration any more. I guess I took the easy route and gave up. The reality is though, now that I am meeting people doing phenomenal things in Tanzania, now more than ever I want to write their stories.

What prompted me to do this much more was meeting young people who generally lack information about entrepreneurship and starting a business. Most of the top blogs in Tanzania are gossip sites, and the occasional site run by a state photographer. There’s nothing to feed the mind with an exception of a fashion blog mostly just Instagram accounts with images and a link to a random website or Blogspot account not updated regularly. My colleague told me she spends a lot of time on YouTube getting ideas to start a side business. And the vlogs she was visiting were mostly by Brits and Americans.

I informed her that this was also an opportunity for her to set up her blog. She has a url now, she just needs to start populating her site.  It’s still a work in progress I am trying to nudge her to get started. I am grateful for organisations like the Bloggers Association of Kenya the Kenyan blogosphere is now building momentum with tonnes of content creators sharing their truth and realities from money, entrepreneurship, travel, photography, religion, motherhood, food etc. There is more coming out of Kenya, but it still isn’t enough. There really is tonnes of room to share our worlds wherever we are.  So if there is something, anything you want to share which is sensible (cause the insensible ones are the loudest online) you should. Quit procrastinating! *As I remind myself of the same*