Tuesday morning. We are leaving the city life of Arusha and are heading to one of the most remote areas of Tanzania. Our destination is Loliondo, the land of the Maasai. With a pick-up full of stationary, exercise books and cooking pots we are heading to supply six primary schools in the district. It is a long but beautiful drive. When we’re crossing the plain grassland between Serengeti and Ngorogoro, we are surrounded by thousands and thousands of wildebeasts and zebras. We stop the car and all four of us are just looking, no one says a word. It is absolutely breathtaking.

Right now I only have one day left at WFP in Madagascar. In two weeks I will spend some final days with WFP in Rome and will take a lot of memories with me...

This morning, on my way to the office, I passed by an international school. From behind the fence, I saw the blue & white of the school uniforms and I heard the sound of children playing and running before school starts. I smiled, and at the same time my thoughts went back to the figures I’ve read last week. Tanzania has one of the lowest enrollment rates of Africa.

This week I was given the opportunity to attend training at the Regional Office of WFP in Johannesburg. It was a great experience, besides learning a lot and meeting many people, it also allowed me to take a peek into WFP's other activities in the countries of East, Central and Southern Africa.

Over 80% of the people of Tanzania are farmers, most of them smallholder farmers. They are dependent on their harvest, the rain and the market. A poor harvest will not just affect the farmer and his family, but has a direct impact on national food security levels and even on the country’s GDP. The upside of this story is that any improvements in agriculture will have a direct significant impact on a large number of people. Not only food security will improve, but also livelihood and even education levels will improve remarkably. There is only one question, how to improve this important but complicated sector? We cannot promise rain, but we can help farmers to improve and sell their harvest.

Living in a small secluded town like Ambovombe has it up- and downsides. There are things I appreciate and things I miss. For example: I like the fact that it is not polluted here as it is in Tana, just as the fact that there are no traffic jams (since there are almost no cars and I did not run into a zebu chart-jam up till now). I love walking to work in the morning and being greeted by almost everyone I pass by. People are calm and friendly and even if someone you don’t know approaches you it is more out of curiosity than out of anything else.

Even though it may sound strange, it is easy to get used to seeing the harsh living conditions people here in Madagascar have to live with. The first few weeks in the field you cannot get your head around the poverty and hunger you see every day: the neighbors kids playing in the yard with their floated bellies, the old man begging for food on the way to work, the skinny little girl chewing on a dry potato because she is hungry but doesn’t have anything else to eat.

They say that one of the characteristics of developing countries is the lack of a middle class. There is a big gap between rich and poor, between cities and villages. It seems like there is nothing in between. And not just from an economical point of view, but in every other aspect. Beautiful nature, landscapes and wildlife goes together with piles of trash along the road. Top-end exclusive and expensive tourism in a country, where one-third of the population is still living under the poverty line. A country full of contrasts. And the same counts for working here. No SACCOS, the farmers organization we are working with, is the same. Describing three of the SACCOS will lead to completely different stories.