Dear friends, yes have been so quiet; but of course with some reasons. Work. But I promise to keep you posted soon as I get time. Regards

The Making of Barrack Obama

Right-to-left: Barack Obama and half-sister Maya Soetoro, with their mother Ann Dunham and grandfather Stanley Dunham, in Hawaii (early 1970s)


President Obama remembering his old good days

Many people in the world do not know that Barack Hussein Obama (47), a 44th President of United State of America, who at one point seen like an enigma and the other like a messiah and not just a political leader, was once a basket ball player and a person who went through typical teenage trauma when searching for his identity.

Barack Obama, the US president with multinational origins, abandoned by his black father at his early childhood, lived in Indonesia and Hawaii, was in a high school basketball team. He loved playing basketball as a kid, and he was nicknamed Barry. (more details)

‘Barry’ a grand son of a paternal- british cook and a maternal- oil rigs worker during great depression; a son of a Kenyan father who grew in a small village in Kenya herding goats; (more details) enjoyed spending time on the beach, fishing and bodysurfing.

‘Barry,’ who was raised by a struggling single mother and maternal grandparents could probably see his early stage of life as miserable and a source of handicap; but to him it was a strength. He was smart and charismatic. He took that life challenge as a source of a new beginning, he went to school, score high grades and become a graduate from Columbia University with a degree in political science.
When Barrack was once asked, “What would you say is the most painful and character-building experience of your life that puts you in a position to make important decisions of life and death…?” He once answered;

“I would say the fact that I grew up without a father in the home. What that meant was that I had to learn very early on to figure out what was important and what wasn’t, and exercise my own judgment and in some ways to raise myself. My mother was wonderful and was a foundation of love for me, but as a young man growing up, I didn’t have a lot of role models and I made a lot of mistakes, but I learned to figure out that there are certain values that were important to me that I had to be true to.

“Nobody was going to force me to be honest. Nobody was going to force me to work hard. Nobody was going to force me to have drive and ambition. Nobody was going to force me to have empathy for other people. But if I really thought those values were important, I had to live them out.” (more details)

President Barack Obama real liked to play basket ball, and he still does the same whenever he can. “Even when he was campaigning for president, he took time out every day to shoot hoops with his friends.” (more details)

Every successful person is also a fail. Barack Obama indeed failed in his life. He was raised by struggling parents, missed paternal care, lost both of his parents and grand parents and moreover passed through some racial challenges but all the same he never relinquished. He studied so hard, finished high school and went to Occidental College in Los Angeles. After two years he transferred to Columbia University where he got his degree in Political Science.

In the making, Barack Obama grew as a man of the people, he was active in students’ campaign in law school, he worked to help poor people in his city Illinois, where he also taught law and was a civil rights attorney. (more details)

In such a making, Barack Obama was able to block race barriers; he gained the interconnectedness and managed to organize and bring different people together and won their support. This took him into Politics, won a Senate seat in 2004 and elected the President of United States of America in 2008.

The Superb Day Four

Heading on



The day started by a continuation of websites visits where we visited aljazeera.net and IPS news. On Aljazeera’s website we managed to inquire about Prof. Manfred Nowak, a UN special rapporteur on tourture.

Our visit to IPS news brought a thoughtful opportunity to journalists in Tanzania after Mr. Gideon Marko, Information officer of MISA-Tanzania, informed the workshop that journalists in Tanzania also have a chance to write and send news and pictures to IPS News; he said with news articles they can get paid up to $180 and $50 for pictures. This was indeed good news to many participants of the workshop.

Mr. Marko, who is also working with IPS News, added that at a greater extent IPS News is not charging media outlets taking news from it. Mr. Peik Johansson also observed that such opportunity is very important to journalists in Tanzania and Africa to counter-report, the negative coverage done by western media to Africa. He cited an example of Ghana elections as an event which did not get enough coverage because it was democratically done; unlike the 2007 Kenyan elections. He added that even Tanzania elections are normally not well reported. IPS News also publishes its content in Swahili.

Another task was to visit MISA website and try tracing its contacts and those of its staff members including the Information Officer (Gideon Marko).

We also got a chance of learning the procedures of linking websites on the posts published in our blogs. This task was followed by an exercise of searching email addresses, telephone numbers and other contacts of various organization including MCT, TANAPA, Ministry of Health; also contacts of Barrack Obama and Information Officer of Amnesty International.

The last part of today's sesion was on practical assignment. He we looked at ways of using internet in checking facts. For example how can a journalist verify the data of 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner (Wangari Maathai), getting the background information of an event, organistion etc, football fixtures, results, qualifyings, standings and updates. Later the facilitator ended the session by leaving an assignment of searching online information for feature writing.

The Third Day of Our Workshop

The third day of our workshop got more interesting and constructive. The day begun with a recap of a previous day. After then our facilitator Mr. Peik Johansson appreciated what the participants have posted (on their respective blogs) as their views on the proceedings of our workshop. He commended on their sincerity and opinion.

After those openning remarks, we looked at the idea of internet in everyday Journalism. It was observed that the internet has multiplied the potential sources of news. From here the workshop managed to view so many websites which are potential sources of journalistic information. Some among them includes websites of local and international media houses, news agencies, IPS news, african journal online, hiiran online, african studies internet resources, allafrica.com, africa literature and writers, african union, website of the government of Tanzania, tanzanian parliament, amnesty international, author.com, hello in more than 800 languages, etc.

Also we got time to discuss the use of email for journalistic purposes. These include the communication a journalist can with the editor before sending a story or an article. Also email interviews and information attachments. We were als able to visit about.com and learn how it help us more in the use of internet.

After then we had a discussion on Journalistic research via internet. Here we were guided on the better tactics of getting online information quickly; especially through the use of google search engine; the specificity is needed when typing a name or topic on the search engine. Moreover accuracy on the type of website one use to get the information. Some websites are not proper authorities in getting such information. There is a need to be keen in using online information. We need to strive getting information from website of relevant authorities.

This event was later followed by an exercise (which was done by all participants) on quick search of online information. the facilitator told us to quickly search for capital cities of coutries like Burkina Faso, Laos and Honduras. Also the population of places like Egypt, Finland and Ruvuma. Also presidents of countries like Namibia and Bolivia.

Essentially this was done to see how participants can be able to quickly get such information, with a particular concern on the words/topics used to search for the information and the authenticity of the information found.

Second day of our Internet and Journalism Workshop

Our second day in the workshop of Internet use and Journalism was also very interesting. We started with the recap of what we did in day one. Here we reviewed the ways of making a website as a home page, and also looked at the statistics on internet use. Alexa webiste was visited for this purpose.

It came to our surpirise that Tanzania was not listed as one among the countries using Internet in Africa. Kenya was there but not the rest of East African countries. In the found countries we basically looked at which websites are most viewed in the respective countries and this was followed by a discussion why such websites are popular than others.

The general overview of this discussion on website use, came to a conclusion that most browsers are not visiting the websites for news search but for other interests like, chatting, online shopping, blogging etc.

After this discussion we were introduced to wikipedia. It is a search engine. The facilitator told the workshop that the uniqueness of wikipedia is that there is a chance for a person who is browsing to edit the content found. We also got a chance to edit some of the content found. For example the content on media in Tanzania was very shallow. It even came as a challenge to us from SAUT; that we can assign our students to look for media history in Tanzania and update the content in the wikipedia

The rationale of this is a belief that as many people visit the website, there is a room for them to change and update the content in the wikipedia for the benefit of other users. But again there is a risk of fraudsters.

After such discussion we had an intersting topic on the websites that changed the world. We looked at the article by John Naughton. John has listed 15 leading websites. These include ebay.com, wikipedia, napster.com, youtube.com, blogger.com, drudgereport.com, myspace.com, amazon.com, slashdot.org, salon.com,google.com, yahoo.com etc.

From such a list we were able to visit and discuss each website and its importance. Moreover we spent enough time creating, publishing and updating our own blogs.

This task was the most interesting for the day. I actually found it interesting in our day to day career in teaching journalism and public relations.

The last part of today's session was to visit google search engine; specifically on images, maps and news. The day was closed at 1720hrs

The 1st day of Internet Training

The day started a littel late due to some technical problems in the room used. Our facilitator, Mr. Peik Johansson, started by explaining the history of Internet.

He later introduced us to the statistics of internet use in the world. It came to our surprise that Tanzania was not among the least users of the internet in the world. While Uganda and Kenya had more than a million users, Tanzania is estimated to have only 400,000 users. Asia is te leading continent in Internet use, the Europe followed by USA. However, USA leads in the internet penetration rates. This meaning many parts of the continent can access the internet easily.

After looking at those statistics, we also practised the online bookings. Here we tried to book a train from Turku to Helsink, assuming that a journalist can get an assigment of such a trip. Also we tried a flight booking from Dar es Salaam to Bujumbura.

Moreover our practice went to internet banking. here we visited websites of CRDB and NBC to in an attempt of practising online banking. The facilitator also helped use to follow the good way of keeping the record of our favorite websites and even to view the entire history of the websites visited.

The first day of the workshop was very interesting. we were all delighted with the new skills obtained from day one of the workshop.

My expectations on the rest of the days of our workshop is that we will get a chance to learn more on Internet use for communication, publication, research and journalism practices. The first day lasted at 1730hrs