From Ordinary Journalist to Computing Journalist

My name is George Ramadhan aka "Garama Uk", a Journalist based in the city of Mwanza North West of Tanzania. For the moment I am working with a local swahili newspaper known as Nipashe (owned by IPP Media).

I entered in journalism profesion 9 years ago, where the use of internet was not yet introduced and we were using telex and fax to send stories to the editors in Dar es Salaam where our editors and mediahouse headquarters belongs.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank God for making me one the Journalists from Lake Zone regions who have been selected by MISA-Tan to attend a 5 days training on how to use an internet to search information all over the world. The training have started on 26 October 2009 at BoT Training Institute in Mwanza. My fellow participants and I started the training by introducing ourselves and explain how each other have been using internet in the past.

There after we went on with the session where the Personal Trainer (Mr. Peik Johanson, a Seneor Journalist from Finland) gave out the meaning of internet and how it has changed the societies and communication globally. We took sometime to compare the usage of internet from different countries in the world, where we found that globally Asia is the leading continent in using internet followed by Europe.

The Trainer also showed the participants the top 20 countries in the world which are mostly using internet where we found China at the top followed by USA. My self I astonished to hear that there’s no African country in the top 20 so far, and funny enough that our neighbour countries, Kenya and Uganda are in top 10 in Africa in the use of internet but Tanzania not.

I take it as a challenge, and I hope after completing this training I would be able to campaign for my fellow Tanzanians to go for internet in order to access many information as many as possible all the world.

As I have seen a training timetable I had hope that we would get a lot of knowledge about internet through the topics which have been prepared by the Trainer, and it was my hope that at the end of the training I’ll not remain the same as I do especially in the use of internet.

Thanks to Peik Johanson and Misa-Tan as well.