Michelle Wong, an EcoGastronomy Major at UNH and a longtime friend of Island Creek is on assignment for us in Zanzibar. She will be blogging about her time in Stonetown, the women she is meeting and her impressions of this far-away place. Michelle’s mission is to visit chefs at local restaurants and resorts to promote the use of the shellfish that will someday be generated by the village hatcheries ICOF and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution are developing.

The woman reaches down and plucks the octopus from the reef, its writhing appendages curling and twisting around her wrist like a string of prayer beads, fighting back. In one swift motion, she takes the long metal spike in her other hand and drives it into the underbelly of the octopus and through the top of its head. A thick stream of ink flows from the animal clenched in her fist, staining the shallow water around our feet an unsettling black. “Chakula kitamu” I joke, “Good food”. The now-still octopus is plopped into an old rice bag along with the assortment of other sea creatures that the woman has collected that morning – small fish, spurting sea cucumbers, snails in intricate shells, cockles, crabs and oysters. By the time the tide rolls in, she expects to have about 10,000 Tanzanian Shillings (TSH) or $6.25 USD worth of product to sell to the locals and middlemen who travel to the fishing village, Fumba every day to buy fresh seafood at a good price. We part ways and I continue towards the dugout canoe anchored at the edge of the reef, tiptoeing around hundreds of devious sea urchins nestled in the coral like landmines.  Today, my guide and I are the guests of a local fisherman and pearl farmer who will show us his pearling operations. To get to the fisherman’s boat we must walk across about a quarter of a mile of young coral reef, which crunches under our feet like broken glass. My stomach turns guiltily.

The pearling and jewelry project is funded by a few groups in the United States including the University of Rhode Island. Large oysters are collected and implanted with three plastic “buttons”. The imbued oysters are then placed in mesh cages that hang from floating lines attached to moorings. Every few days the oysters are scrubbed down and cleaned, and nine months later, shimmering semi-spherical pearls are ready to be made into necklaces and earrings by the village women who can get about 30,000 TSH ($18.75 USD) for each piece – the equivalent of what many island families make in two weeks. Seashells collected from surrounding villages are also incorporated into the jewelry pieces.

The thought I can’t shake however, is how focused the Fumba villagers – the intended beneficiaries of the hatchery seed, are on jewelry making versus farming.  In some ways our project is in direct compeition with the jewelry/pearl project for the villagers’ attention, time, and interest. Jewelry making and pearling are smart, supplementary industries but they don’t do anything to solve the crux of the problem and the reason why people turned to jewelry in the first place; depletion of wild shellfish stocks. I think back to the woman I met on the reef. Although she might make some decent money for her harvest, she wasn’t able to find even one kilo of each species, only finding a handful of each. This method of harvesting also involves walking over and ultimately damaging coral reef which is an incredibly delicate and important part of the ecosystem.

While jewelry does provide the villagers with money, it doesn’t directly feed them like aquaculture. Maybe a happy partnership can be forged between these two related projects with a majority of the hatchery seed being used for consumption and the remaining fraction being used for pearls. Shellfish farming – heck, all farming in general – requires tremendous patience. And for people who live off of less than $5 a day, who are hungry today, patience must seem like a lot to ask. But with a little patience, foresight, and creativity, big problems can be solved with some pretty exciting, big solutions.

Michelle Wong, an EcoGastronomy Major at UNH and a longtime friend of Island Creek is on assignment for us in Zanzibar. She will be blogging about her time in Stonetown, the women she is meeting and her impressions of this far-away place. Michelle’s mission is to visit chefs at local restaurants and resorts to promote the use of the shellfish that will someday be generated by the village hatcheries ICOF and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution are developing.

It seems like no matter where you travel to on this island that people are in constant contact with the sea. On the two hour drive to Nungwi, Zanzibar’s northernmost point studded with luxury resorts, you can see women gathering shellfish along the beach for miles.  To make the trip north I hopped in the back of a dala-dala. Precarious vehicles that can only be described as a long pickup truck with a roof, dala-dalas are the most popular and authentic method of transportation on the island. Open sides let hawkers wave fistfuls of grilled corn and fresh sugar cane in passenger’s faces, wobbling roofs held up by intricately carved wooden trellises support burlap sacks filled with coconuts, and babies are handed off to nap in strangers’ laps when there isn’t enough room to sit.

My purpose in Nungwi wasn’t to dissolve into the golden halo of white sand or join the busloads of European tourists in a photographic frenzy (although maybe a little of both did happen), but to gain an audience with chefs at the resorts that occupy the town. So off I went each morning; hat on my head, pen in my hand in search of bivalve-curious customers. At Island Creek Oysters, it is often said that we don’t have to work hard to sell our product; the oysters are so good, they can sell themselves. Therefore it’s ultimately about the relationships that you build with the people who feed them to the world. And in Nungwi, I am pleased to report every executive chef, food & beverage manager, and general manager that I spoke with wanted in. Much like home, it wasn’t hard to find people who were as eager to participate as they were hungry for good shellfish.

After a long first day it was time to succumb to the lullaby of waves crashing and blowing kisses to the setting sun. I was sitting down at a local bar when I met a young fisherman from South Africa. We were sharing the sunset, a few cold beers, and stories from home when he told me about the ferry accident. In 2012, a ferry over-loaded with refrigerators, cars, and more than 2,000 passengers capsized on rough waters off of Nungwi. The fisherman, only a few months older than myself told me how the beach turned black with bodies and of the lives that slipped out of his hands because the water was too slick with oil. He told me how the sea was so brimming with corpses that he feared to turn on his boat’s engine. And he told me how he and the local fishermen were called out at midnight to search for survivors because Tanzanian navy personnel didn’t know how to swim.

His story left me speechless. I instantly thought of the women in villages just minutes from where the ferry sank, most whom are unable to swim. This inability is an incredible handicap that makes it impossible for them to join men in fishing boats. Perhaps if the women were taught to swim with the addition of improved equipment, like the dredges that we use at ICO to harvest at high tide, they might be able to access the abundance of shellfish in deeper waters? And if this was so, then perhaps there wouldn’t be such a great need for a shellfish farm? But of course, we are here for a reason. Life has its odd ways of showing you, even in the most beautiful of places, the value of something as simple and inherent as teaching a woman to swim; much like teaching a man to fish.

-Michelle Wong

Michelle Wong, an EcoGastronomy Major at UNH and a longtime friend of Island Creek is on assignment for us in Zanzibar.  She will be blogging about her time in Stonetown, the women she is meeting and her impressions of this far-away place.  Michelle’s mission is to visit chefs at local restaurants and resorts to promote the use of the shellfish that will someday be generated by the village hatcheries ICOF and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution are developing.

Zanzibar, January 16, 2013