Darrell vs The World

I finished at CARE Mozambique just before Christmas, and I’m starting with Oxfam in South Africa on the 11th of January. I’ve travelled a bit in between, but rather than listing exactly where I went and what I did I’ll just mention a few things of note. The first event of note was being mugged at knifepoint in the mid sized South African city of Nelspruit (no, Microsoft Word, Nelspruit, not Newsprint). After walking around carefree around even dodgy-looking places in Mozambique, I guess I was a bit more confident about safety, and on my first day back in SA (Christmas Eve) I was walking down a busy street at 9am when three guys surrounded me, held the knife to my throat (didn’t hurt me luckily), emptied my pockets and told me menacingly never to come to that part of town again. White South Africans later confirmed to me that that area of the town is not for white people, ever. What a country. I was treated with a bundle of Christmas kindness, though, when a man called Jono who work...

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

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...

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 incom...

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...

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. Whe...

First off, things are getting better here. I’m getting used to the climate here, and I’ve realised that the hot days alternate with cool, wet days that are quite pleasant for me (but a bit cold for the locals). Power cuts have happened less often than I thought they would, my panic surrounding mosquitoes has subsided to a healthy level and I’m waking up at a more regular hour. In all, things are going OK, although there is still an animal in my ceiling. This week I went on my first NGO-funded overnight field trip to do a bit of field research about the logistics of buying and selling goats and cattle in rural Mozambique. Pretty obscure stuff. I know very little about livestock, or Mozambique, or anything for that matter, but I’ve been assigned to the task of doing an economic analysis of prices, buying and selling, the impacts of diseases like bovine tuberculosis and other factors affecting the livestock game here, so that CARE can hopefully improve the way it approaches livestock...