Bob Dylan sometimes says it all for me.

And when it's time for leaving Mozambique,
To say goodbye to sand and sea,
You turn around to take a final peek
And you see why it's so unique to be
Among the lovely people living free
Upon the beach of sunny Mozambique.

-Bob Dylan, 1975

Things to smile about in Mozambique

I'm sorry that my blogs here have so far been a bit depressing. Either I've been complaining about comfort, or bureaucracy, or lamenting the poverty and social problems here. I feel it's time to devote an entire entry to the things that make me smile in Mozambique. My work is largely complete and I have my passport back safely. While I've enjoyed my time here all along, I suppose that various high-stress events (and if you know me, you'll know that most events are high-stress events) have made it onto paper ahead of the small, nicer things. So here we go.

1. I saw a wedding party go past this morning. It was three Hilux-style pickup trucks. The first was full of women in the back singing beautifully. In the second, the bride and groom stood, and the third had some other people, also singing, but a different song to the first car as they were far enough behind for them not to be synchronised.

2. You see a lot of locals on the street wearing Australian clothes. I've seen Kmart staff T-shirts, AFL team tops (a few years out of date), a Melbourne Uni rugby top, and various other things. I think the story is that they're donated second hand clothes, but they end up in the markets. I tell them where their clothes are from, but they don't seem that interested.

3. I got Rickrolled in my second week in Vilankulos, but I don't think the people who Rickrolled me knew they did. Out of all the wonderful English-language music that exists, the genre Mozambicans seem to have taken to the most is 80s synth pop, and Rick was a feature on one illegal mix CD one of the drivers had picked up.

4. I haven't seen a lot of TV here, but at a CARE camp one evening we were watching TV, and it seemed like the sound was muted, so about four guys each took their turn to bang the TV on the side a few times, then gave up. I then had a go, fiddling with the mute buttons on both remotes, then gave up. So they called the resident technology expert of the camp, who proceeded to bang the TV a few more times. I think he got it working.

5. One of the projects CARE has been working on has been to set up an intermediary in one of the towns who buys goats from villages then sells them to buyers who come from the cities. A sale was set up one afternoon, and we drove over with the buyers in the back of the pick-up, and this guy was nowhere to be found. We waited two hours, then gave up, then encountered him on the road back. He had the cheesiest of grins on his face, which prevented me from being annoyed at him for standing us up, because the look on his face basically said, "I have absolutely no idea what's going on or supposed to be happening, but it's really nice to see you!"

6. At the cattle fairs, there are inevitably cattle breaking free of the flimsy wooden pens, and galloping off into the bush, followed by a trail of young boys brandishing sticks and yelling after it.

7. I have a knack for being stuck next to fat ladies in small vehicles for long journeys. One of them, who was drunk, asked me to marry her in slurring Portuguese, then spilt beer on my foot. The driver gave me his crusty handkerchief to wipe it clean.

8. There's a town called Mabote, where CARE bases a lot of its rural work. I like to call it The End of the World As We Know It- it has electricity from 6.30pm to 9.30pm only, it has no running water as far as I know, no sealed roads, and the street is lined with peculiar Wild-West style buildings painted bright yellow by the major telco, Mcel, who sponsors buildings in the same way a company sponsors a soccer team- it just paints its logo all over the outside walls. It's such an unappealing place that it's funny.

9. One thing Mabote can pride itself on is the fact that it has the most stunning view of the stars after dark. With no electric light at all in town, the night sky is clear and beautiful.

10. There's an old lady beggar who comes by the place I stay some mornings. She stands outside, and the staff bring her a bread roll. She doesn't say anything when she receives it; she just holds up her fist, clenched, somehow expressing thanks and solidarity in a more powerful and warm way than words could.

Stuck inside of chapa with the passport blues again

Informal public transport in Mozambique is an experience. I’m sure if you’ve travelled in other ‘developing countries’ you already get the idea. Minibuses don’t leave on schedule; they don’t even leave when full, they leave when they’re above capacity. They are the arteries and veins of the bloodstream of the informal economy – traders pack in their wares, including the obligatory live chickens. The buses – chapas, they’re called here – occasionally race one another at full speed on long stretches of highway, that is, when there aren’t potholes. When there are, chapas tend to prefer to drive on the dirt path next to the road instead. At crossroads towns, dozens of desperate vendors rush up to each new vehicle and wave their goods into the windows to the passengers. I saw one old lady attack a boy who I think was on her ‘turf’, selling stuff in her area.

The most tragic thing is perhaps this huge number of young kids working on the streets selling little things for little income. These kids should be in school, but I suppose that either with parents who need them to work for extra household income, or with no parents at all, they are forced to work. To put it into perspective, imagine sad-faced Australian primary-aged kids lingering on the streets of your home suburb trying to sell you phone credit, or soft drinks, or bread, especially during school hours. Very few Mozambicans finish high school, and of those that do, many do so much later in life, in their 30s. School fees are expensive relative to income, and there is a nationwide textbook shortage. For me, poverty is most simply defined as lacking the chance to achieve your full potential.

When my colleagues at CARE, or the staff at my guesthouse, or my Portuguese teacher question me about how things are in Australia in comparison to here, I almost feel guilty for living in a comparatively perfect state, where the government provides a safety net for the needy, where education is free, accessible and universal, where children play and read instead of working on the streets. Sure, Australia is not perfect, but compared to Mozambique, it is, in terms of government-provided services.

Speaking of government, my sole personal concern right now is my passport, which remains in the provincial capital and has been there for a week, waiting for a signature from some director which will formalise my visa renewal – why can’t the lady behind the desk just sign it – what’s the difference? The inefficient bureaucratic practices are pushing me to my limits, and it worries me especially as my flight out of Mozambique is just over a week away. We can say “this is Africa” with a chuckle all we like, but not when it concerns the single most valuable document we possess.

This, like most of the others, has been a bleak entry, and I’m sorry to those who are reading and want to read something nice. I have been enjoying my time here overall, excited by what I am learning, and interested in the sporadic work I am getting done with CARE. And when I sit at a seaside restaurant at dusk, to see the sun gently set as I gaze over the Indian Ocean, I’m reminded that there are beautiful things about this place.

Being worthwhile

My greatest challenge here now is not the climate, or the power outages or the language. It’s the constant niggling that makes me need to feel that this whole thing has been worthwhile: that I’ve achieved something, or I’ve contributed, or it’s been worth my time, money and energy to be here and volunteer for six weeks.

Early on I declared to myself that it was wholly unrealistic to expect that I would achieve something every day here; I decided that this would be a success if I did something of value every week. So far, so good. Now, in week four, I find myself struggling to know what I will be doing this week, if anything at all. And this makes part of me shudder, and feel really miserable.

But I need to look at the bigger picture. Six weeks on a development internship is a ridiculously short time. Volunteers come here for two years and say that the first year is for working out what’s going on and the second year for actually doing work. And working in a new environment in a culture so different from my own, it is unreasonable to think that I can be anywhere near as productive as I want to be in this tiny timeframe.

I knew before I came that I wouldn’t make a real difference to this organisation – no unskilled, inexperienced university student could expect to in just six weeks. But I hoped I’d be learning things constantly about development, and NGOs, and Mozambique, all the time, and that I’d be busy, working on all sorts of little things. But even when I do have worthwhile work to do, it runs out quickly, and I ask around for what to do next, and there’s nothing.

I realise that I need to look at it from the managers’ points of view. When I was working with the Global Poverty Project campaign back home I sometimes had two or three interns assigned to help me out. Sometimes I could give them jobs that didn’t really need to be done; sometimes I could give them the most painful menial tasks imaginable, and a lot of the time I was clueless as to what to do with them. And we were working in English, and they were more skilled than me in many ways. So what can I expect, working in an unfamiliar country with an unfamiliar language on a project totally unlike anything I’ve really experienced?

Realistically, given that I’ve already worked on three livestock data analyses and identified a number of inefficiencies in the way the system works, I’ve already contributed to a very reasonable level given my position. And I think I should understand that even if I go through entire weeks where I do nothing of value, I’m still learning just by being here, and I’m learning that to be valuable in this kind of work you need to stick around a lot longer.

To finish on a more positive note, I won a bottle of wine in a raffle at a primary children’s musical at the local centre for rich white expatriate children, which I found myself at thanks to the guesthouse owner inviting me. I don’t really drink wine, and I would hardly drink it alone anyway, so it’ll make a nice gift for someone when I leave. It’s already got a nice little bow on it, so I can just leave that on and make it look like I made an effort.

A seaside pace

I’ve been in Mozambique for three weeks, and I leave Mozambique in three weeks. But things are not awful, as my earliest blog reported. Sure, it’s sometimes not as comfortable as I want it to be, but overall, things are good. And I could probably stay here a lot longer if I had a longer time frame to work with.

Vilankulos is honestly a great place to be based for an African internship. It’s by the sea – that alluring Indian Ocean, central to romantic ideals about Mozambique with its fishermen, its beaches and exotic bird and marine life – I went snorkelling on Sunday for the first time- it was pretty cool. There are allegedly lots of dugongs here. I haven’t seen (or heard) any, though. I look out the office window from my Excel spreadsheet, and see palm trees gently blowing in the wind. I eat a banana at 6:30am as I walk to the ATM – on the way, the city streets are already lively and busy with the stereotypical “African” suspects – women carrying stuff on their heads etc. When it rains, it rains for four days; in the afternoon, the fishermen tout freshly-caught metre-long fish at the major intersections; there are rusted shipwrecks beached down by the jetty, and when the tide goes out, the locals walk out on the sand around the temporarily-beached dhow boats.

I’ve been able to get a much better idea of what I’m doing here. The end aim is to help rural criadores (herders and farmers of livestock) to earn a good and stable income. To ensure they can, they need buyers from urban areas to regularly buy the animals. My job is to look at the situation from the buyers’ perspective and see if it is financially viable, and sustainable. Because if it isn’t working for buyers, it leaves the criadores stuck with no income source.

My role involves data collection in the field about prices and logistics, then doing a study back at the office to crunch the numbers. When I collect data, I ask the questions in bad Portuguese, and a field agent translates it into the local language. That’s right; I speak much better Portuguese than a lot of rural Mozambicans (I’m taking lessons now, as well, and growing in confidence). One problem, however, was conveying the idea of opportunity cost in Portuguese, and then getting it translated to the local language. Opportunity cost is a concept difficult to grasp even as a first-year economics student – to get accurate figures on the income sacrificed by doing another activity is hard with rural Mozambicans, but central to finding out whether their activities are ultimately profitable.

My main concern over the past couple of weeks has been worrying I will not have enough work to do, and that I will run out of things to keep me occupied. Right now I’ve got work to do, and I don’t know how long it will last, but I feel I don’t need to work at a frenetic pace with German efficiency – on the field trips, there’s so much time allocated for relaxing, and people seem to be much more casual about work here – so I think I’ll try to work at a seaside pace- a tropical pace. I’ll get work done, but I don’t need to rush it. I’m in Mozambique, after all.