Green Village - Momella

Well, we have found our first village for a Green Village project - Momella Village - between Mount Meru and Mount Kilimanjaro. Momella is located in the most beautiful location I have ever seen, but is a mass of unfinished buildings, hopeless people, and the largest collection of wind-blown plastic bags! It is the market hub for all surrounding villages, and the people who come into the village leave their trash, and the community does nothing to clean it up.

Momella is situated right next to Arusha National Park, and so has much potential for green economic development. Currently, people who visit the park go out of their way NOT to go through Momella, because it is such a depressed and trashed area that they do not want visitors to see it. It is a tourist mecca, but the village has no small businesses in place to attract visitors. The villagers are a combination of Meru and Maasai tribes, and thus have many skills and traditional crafts they could offer, but again, nothing is going on.

We have chosen Momella for all of these reasons - it is the perfect place to test out the Green Village process - cleaning up the environment, training people in green business processes, providing micro-finance loans to start up small businesses, and then promoting the village as an eco-friendly tourist location.

So, we'll see! The pictures above and below are the current symbols for Momella - toxic water and plastic bags. Hopefully as this blog continues, more pictures of Momella will come, showing work taking place and progress being made. Stay tuned.