Pilar Millan, a resident of Ulldecona (Montsià ) fell in love with Tanzania on a journey of personal introspection. This experience led her to the creation of Piks on Safari, a travel agency in Africa that offers a different experience than what other agencies usually offer. These are “signature trips”, personalized and responsible with the African continent. They are trips with a positive local impact, far from stereotypes, myths and “voluntarism”.
Pilar Millan’s dream was to take a trip of a lifetime, so about six years ago, at a time when life in Barcelona “dismounted” for her, she decided to travel to Tanzania with some friends. The group returned, but she stayed. “I started to fit in another life without realizing it,†she reflects now. After traveling alone through Africa and working in various places on the continent, she returned to Catalonia and immediately decided that her place was in Tanzania.
Going back and forth, it’s been about six years. In the African country she has fallen in love and has created a family with her Tanzanian husband, Henry Mwakajumna, with whom she has two small children. They live “between the two worlds” and they show it through photos on a social network.
She opened an account to portray her experiences and with which she sought to “break with prejudice and distortion” and unlink everything related to Africa with poverty and misery. The interest aroused by everything she showed put the idea into motion. “My environment wanted to come and experience it like me and I thought that it came from the world of tourism as always, which is my passion. I lived in a place that people wanted to discover and I could contribute something to a world of injusticesâ€, thus Piks on Safari was born.
People interested in traveling to Tanzania want to go to Zanzibar and do a safari, but Millan tries to go further and for people to experience their own experience in the country and “break stereotypes” based on “living on the black continent of a coherent wayâ€, he summarizes.
When a client contacts them, they first meet to “find out what style of travel they have in mind and translate it into a route” on the map. Pilar adds to her trips “all the knowledge she has from living there and the possibilities of coordinating it.” She then makes them a proposal, adapted to the days available and the particular interests of each one, and includes cultural and traditional activities.
On a trip with Piks on Safari you can learn to cook with one of her neighbors who offers Tanzanian cooking and tasting workshops at her home. You can also discover bike routes organized by small local businesses “that big tour operators can’t contact.” These big companies, for Millan, offer “trips without a soul” that can be done anywhere.
“I want them to be ethical trips from start to finish. It would not make sense to offer them as expensive as the rest, it must be consistent, â€he points out. Millan likes to work with companies with a positive impact, like the bike company that promotes plastic collection workshops for his community. “I haven’t discovered anything, I’m just making it available to clients,†she says. Proximity values, zero kilometer and circular economy also in Africa.
Pilar went to Tanzania, through some family acquaintances, to volunteer at an orphanage. She paid 500 dollars, although she donated other economic resources to finance projects of the same center. From that experience she has a strong opinion against the “volunteer business”: she rejects, advises against and would never do volunteer work like that again. As she explains, when she learned about the reality of the country and how they live “without much”, she realized that the money she had paid had had no impact on that orphanage.
The will for change of those responsible for these places does not exist because they want the next volunteers to come to be so sorry that they continue coming, but the money does not go where it should goâ€, he points out. “We encourage a type of travel that doesn’t make any sense. Africa in the end swallows everything, it is our container for everything, also for our vital experiences, â€he laments. Millan ended up helping those children by occasionally taking them out of the center to have experiences like going to the movies, eating in a restaurant or seeing the sea.
With the series of posts on the networks, Millan and her husband, Mwakajumba, show their life as a mixed couple in Africa and the challenges that Pilar encounters there. They want to demystify what the country is like and open the eyes of users to a different Tanzania from the one people have in mind. Demonstrating the daily life of the couple and their environment, as with her children, Millan is still not sure whether to also expose them in this project, although she does not rule out starting other similar initiatives, but showing a family trip throughout the African country.
Pilar points out that Tanzania and Africa also have their stereotypes of how people are in Europe. The fact that Henry began a relationship “with a white woman” was not taken seriously in the environment of his friends and he even felt harmed when they got married.
They were afraid that Pilar would abandon him or how he would raise the children. Instead, the Mwakajumba family welcomed Millan “very wellâ€, although she acknowledges that she sometimes gets lost in conversations because she is not yet fully fluent in Swahili. In addition, on the street they continue to treat her like a tourist.
Her husband helps her deepen her knowledge of the culture and the country and is in charge of showing everything they do, with audiovisual content. “He is a very important part of Piks on Safari,†says Pilar. In fact, Henry Mwakajumba is a film director and will soon present his film ‘Lost and Found’, where he addresses the sexist violence in his country.
“Here we fight very actively and we are very organized. Not there yet,†says Millan. “They must understand that it is their fight and how they have to do it because it does not mean that they have to fight like we do, but it is also a scourge,” he laments.
“The film uncovers a reality that we do not consider,” says Pilar, but “Lost and Found” also addresses themes such as love, that it can do anything and, above all, how Mwakajumba “sees his life.” He has written, shot and directed it. “It is a spectacular project and I think it will surprise because it shows another side of African cinema far from perpetuating certain stereotypesâ€. The film will premiere in Ulldecona on September 1, 2023.
