A Zimbabwean man, Tawanda Kanhema, has almost single handedly led a project to put Zimbabwe and Namibia onto google maps Streetview.
Kanhema told Good morning America that he heard about the Google camera loan program and borrowed cameras after hw could not find his parents’ house on the map.
Kanhema ended up also mapping North Ontario.Â
Kanhema told Good Morning America:
I was having dinner with friends and my friend’s dad asked me to show him my mom’s house on the map, we all have the habit of looking up our home the first thing we pick up a map. And so for me that’s something I had done before.
And I knew that I could not find my hometown. It occurred to me that this was something that probably many people experience, I wanted to know what I think I could do about it.
I spoke to the team I told them about Zimbabwe and 14 of the countries in the south and Africa region that I thought would make an interesting place to represent on this platform.
And so I went back home to Zimbabwe to do a pilot shoot where I just held a camera out of the window of my brother’s car and drove around the city of Harare.
When I came back, I had collected about 24 to 30 miles of footage.
I was able to go back to Zimbabwe and do a larger scale project that took two weeks and covered about 2000 miles of highways and other attractions.
The most compelling thing for me is hearing from people who are using these images to help share a memory from their lives, I hear from people who say, I was able to show my daughter, the home in which they grew up and was able to show my kids the hospital in which I was born, just being able to hear that people are using maps, not just for medication and finding instance they’re using maps to make connections, you’re using maps to tell stories.
Please watch the video above this post for more details.
