Celebrating at T3 Church

On Sunday morning, Laura and I commemorated several firsts and a farewell: our first time going to church in T3 (a suburb of Maputo), our first time sitting in a church service that lasted over three hours (3 hours, 35 minutes, if you count from the time it was supposed to start), and a farewell celebration for Bruce and Mabel Callender, who have been living in Mozambique building churches for 10 years. This was their last Sunday before retiring.

The video makes apparent the great level of appreciation and admiration that the Mozambicans have for Bruce and Mabel for their help through much hardship over the past decade.

The community was also celebrating because that morning was the first time that the church had met in their new building. They had previously been crowding into a smaller caniço structure next door.

(Today also marks the first time that I've tried video editing, using the "video" mode on our still camera and the free software that comes with Windows, no less. Move over, Hollywood!)

Laura had the idea of posting some video footage of this morning's service. What a great way to open the window into our world just a little wider. Please let us know if the video has worked for you -- if it's an effective tool, we could try to extend the experiment a little further.

So, whenever you're ready to glimpse today's African celebration, pop some popcorn, throw up your feet, and roll the clip -- today's feature is about 35 seconds long.

Samuel, micro-entrepreneur

Just how small does an enterprise need to be in order to be called "micro"?

Laura has been reminding me for days now (if truth be told, it's probably been two weeks) that I'm in need of a hair cut. What better opportunity than this to explore micro-enterprise in action, and to give you a glimpse into the life of a micro-entrepreneur.

Samuel is a young man that I've gotten to know through his work as a guard at the house where Laura and I are staying for the next week, and also as a guitar player at one of the local churches that we've attended a couple of times.

Samuel, who is in his mid- to late-twenties, is a high school student. Mozambicans are hungry for education. Many people missed out during the civil war that ended in the early 1990s, and are now trying to catch up as adults.

Last week I learned that Samuel also owns a barber shop, so I asked if he would take me there some day. That day was today.

Samuel's shop is a small building made of caniço (pronounced "kan-ee-soo"), which is a thick, hard reed that is Mozambique's traditional construction material. The shop also has a corrugated metal roof and a wooden door that is fastened closed with some stiff wire. Most days, Samuel has an employee who does the hair cutting. Today, however, Samuel would cut my hair because his employee didn't show up for work.

The shop doesn't have electricity, so it closes at dark (which is about 6:00pm). The barber's main tool, a set of electric clippers, is powered by a car battery running through a transformer. The battery is recharged at a shop not too far away that has electricity. Each charge lasts nearly a week.

Samuel had never cut "white" hair before. The trickiest part, he learned, was cutting the soft little hairs on the back of my neck. His blade was a little dull, but otherwise he did a great job.

Samuel has a price list posted on the wall. My cut cost 15,000 meticais, which is about 60 cents. Some fancier cuts cost up to 20,000 meticais.

Samuel's shop is relatively successful (at least, that's my observation). When he set up shop a year and a half ago, he took out a loan of 5,000,000 meticais, which he was able to pay back in just a few months. On this day, he had a customer at the shop before me, and by the time I was done, there were several other people waiting their turn outside.

If you're ever in Maputo, I would definitely recommend Samuel's barber shop, though I would have to show you where it is since there is no sign out front (Samuel assured me that everyone knew it was a barber shop). And you just can't beat the price.

A Bump in the Road

Potholes are commonplace in the streets of Maputo. The bump that I hit today was more figurative, but no less frustrating.

A few weeks ago, I was excited about the possibility of partnering with an existing micro-credit lending institution, leveraging its existing infrastructure and experience for maximum results. In Sunday's blog posting about Graduation Day, I first expressed the possibility of a chip in the veneer:

The participants [of our first micro-enterprise training program] challenged the bank's business model and interest rates, and provided suggestions to one another about credit options that might be superior.

I spent this morning exploring micro-credit options that exist for poor entrepreneurs in Maputo. I didn't expect to run up against such discouragement.

There are three micro-credit banks officially registered with the government of Mozambique: Banco Oportunidade, at which my comments in the previous posting were directed (operated by Opportunity International); NovoBanco, which is operated by Pro-Credit; and SOCREMO, which until recently was owned by the state.

All three offer similar loan terms: they require the lender to have a track record of success as demonstrated through an existing business, and they charge crippling rates of interest: for the smallest loans, the three charge from 5.5% to 6.5% per month. That's 90.1% to 112.9% per year. Business success is a lot more difficult to come by with such a high cost of capital.

Not to mention that, in Canada, those rates would be a Criminal Code offense.

(For the armchair economists in the group, you're right -- developing nations do have higher interest rates than we would expect to have in a developed nation. But not that high. The Banco de Moçambique, Mozambique's central bank, reports that its overnight rate is just below 16% per annum, and inflation has been slightly negative for the past quarter.)

Micro-credit is supposed to be a broadly-accepted development tool. It's supposed to have freed poor entrepreneurs from the grips of money lenders and their usurious interest rates. Last year was even declared the International Year of Microcredit by the United Nations and a cadre of other well-respected multinational organizations.

Why, then, are the poor still faced with such steep interest rates? And what requires an organization such as Opportunity International -- operating as a registered charity in developed nations, receiving donations from well-intentioned Westerners -- to charge such a high rate of interest?

There must be a good explanation, but I haven't heard it yet.

The potholes in Maputo are numerous and deep, but none yet deep enough to have swallowed my hope. Tomorrow we'll start looking for alternatives.

Graduation Day

On Friday morning we held a graduation ceremony for the 18 participants of the micro-enterprise training program that has taken place over the past two weeks (see Khongolote). The 18 new graduates, along with the trainers and myself, are pictured to the right. (Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to figure out which one is me. Hint: you can click on the photo to see a larger version.)

It will take follow-up visits to all of these people in the coming weeks and months to really gain insight into the value of the program offered, but already I have seen some exciting fruit as participants' eyes were opened to simple business principles.

One lady shared during the post-training evaluation that the most important realization that she made during the two weeks of training was the need to separate personal and business finances. This lady shared how this simple realization will improve her business: before this training session, she did not know how much profit she was earning from the sale of charcoal. She competed by offering the same product with the same terms of sale as her competitors. Now she realizes that she can sell her charcoal for a lower price, but insist that her clients pay right away rather than extending them credit. Under her old business model, her business was constrained because of a cash flow problem resulting from her receivables -- that is, because people paid for her product up to a month after having purchased it, she would not have sufficient cash to purchase her next lot of inventory for the rest of that month. Now she knows that by insisting her clients pay right away (and offering a lower price for doing so), she'll improve her cash flow and be able to turn her inventory three times faster.

It's also exciting to see the participants and trainers actively challenging and debating one another with respect to business implementation and improvement. One of the most clear examples of this resulted from the bank credit lecture given by a representative from Banco Oportunidade (Opportunity International). The participants challenged the bank's business model and interest rates, and provided suggestions to one another about credit options that might be superior. (We're going to investigate some of these options in the coming week.) Praise God that they are thinking critically about their options!


Sustainability

Some people have asked me why I'm not doing the training myself (after all, didn't I learn something in my MBA program that I could convey to African entrepreneurs?) This question strikes to the heart of my development philosophy, which thankfully is shared by my colleague, Glenn.

As a development practitioner, Christian missionary, foreigner -- whatever language is used -- the objective (in my view) should be to remain in the background and make oneself dispensable as quickly as possible. My role is as a mentor, a guide, an encourager, a facilitator -- but only where absolutely necessary as an up-front leader.

The key to creating a program that is sustainable is to ensure that it is lead from the outset by those it will benefit. The drawbacks of this approach, of course, are a bit of a loss of control over the ultimate direction of the program and perhaps an implementation that is slower than the breakneck speed that we are usually accustomed to. However, creating a program that is firmly in the grasp of Mozambicans will ensure that they buy into the concept, have the confidence and skills required to keep it going after we leave, and most importantly that they remain the masters of their own destiny.

My burden is to keep these values front-and-centre in my mind, since Laura and I are only staying for a year and we hope, in that year, to create some lasting change.

Laura's First Two Weeks

Laura is at school right now, and has nearly finished her second week of teaching. She's enjoying teaching more than she expected to, which is great. The workload is pretty heavy, so between the new demands of teaching and having to navigate a new culture, she's pretty tired by the end of each day.

(We've now been living out of our suitcases in other people's homes for 7 weeks, which has been taking a bit of a toll. We'll be glad when, in two weeks from now, we get our own apartment and can finally unpack and relax.)

Ideally, "Mrs Kuhn" would write her own blog entry about teaching, but that will have to come later, when she has more time. Writing is a relaxing diversion for me, but just more work for her.

Laura is having fun coming up with assignments for students and figuring out ways to get them excited about math and science. Yesterday, she created an assignment that requires her students to research a space mission -- they can choose any shuttle or probe -- and find out about the scientific research that was conducted on the mission. Personally, I think Laura will enjoy reading the students' reports at least as much as the kids enjoy doing it. They groaned about having to write an essay in science class!

Laura has to be at school by 7:00am each day, with her last class ending at 1:45pm. She usually stays at school to work for another couple of hours to prepare lessons for the following days.

On the way to school yesterday, she carried a jar with her to pick up some sand on the side of the road (Maputo is very dry -- there's an abundance of sand everywhere) for a science experiment that day. The students had to measure the temperature of sand and water to see which one heated up more quickly and, once hot, which one was best at retaining its heat. I stopped into the school at the end of her classes and helped her to make some potion for today's science experiments.

Whatever the potion was required her to wear a lab coat and goggles. I wanted to get a picture of her in full lab gear to share, but she politely refused. I guess she'll be able to empathize when her class of junior scientists objects to wearing those goggles -- what high school kid wants to walk into her next class with a "goggle face" imprint across her forehead?

Well, time to go study my algebra in case Mrs. Kuhn springs a surprise quiz on me!

How the Other Half Lives

The business training program that was offered in Khongolote this week has been instrumental in my cultural education process. Before coming to Mozambique, I had heard the often-cited statistic that over half the world lives on less than $2 a day, but as often as I’ve heard it, I’ve wondered what it really meant.


Luxuries

On Wednesday, we encouraged the students to think about potential products or services that they could offer at their micro-businesses. Each student was asked to write down their three most recent purchases, and then as a group the items were categorized into three groups: necessities, desires, and luxuries.

What a lesson in Mozambican culture! Their list of necessities included rice, bread, a candle, and fish. The class actively debated whether clothing and sandals were necessities or not – just like in North America, a basic level is necessary, they eventually agreed. Their desired items included cold drinks, sugar and tapioca.

Nobody in the class had purchased anything recently that was categorized as a luxury item, so the instructors asked the class to dream a list of luxuries. The list included a gas stove (which we will have once we move into our apartment -- though there's a gas shortage in Mozambique right now, so it's a little unclear how useful it will be), a refrigerator, liver, salad dressing and a computer. Nobody in class had these things.

And, it would appear, nobody even dreamed of having a car, a boat, a cottage or a vacation.

(After class, a student asked me for my email address. I took the opportunity to ask about computers and Internet – apparently the World Wide Web is accessible in Khongolote, where electricity was installed less than two years ago, though nobody can afford a computer. Internet cafes keep the residents of Khongolote connected with the wider world.)


A Loaf of Bread

As an inducement to encourage attendance, I’ve been providing “breakfast” for the class all week – bread from a bakery two doors down from the church, so fresh that it’s still warm, jam, butter and tea. The number of meals people eat varies depending upon the amount of food that they have, but this breakfast late in the morning and a dinner late in the day is pretty typical, I'm told.

I buy 14 loaves of bread each day, which cost me 49,000 Meticais, or a little under $2.


Microcredit in Action

I mentioned in a previous blog entry that many people in Khongolote own their own homes, which seems a little at odds with their level of poverty. When our microenterprise training introduced informal savings and credit circles last week, the students were already familiar with the concept – they frequently implement them (called “xitiques” in Shangaana) to purchase their homes rather than using traditional bank mortgages (which are inaccessible to them).

To understand how a xitique (roughly pronounced she-teek) works, imagine this: a group of 20, 30 or 40 people meet weekly, and each contribute a small amount of money into a pot. Each week, a different member of the group brings the collected pot home and uses it for their major expenditure: perhaps the purchase of a house, or a large medical bill, or a child’s tuition. By the time that everyone has received the pot, each person has contributed the value of their “loan” through their weekly contributions.

It’s a simple step to apply the already-familiar concept of a xitique to investment in an income-producing business.

The people of Africa are bright, resourceful, resilient people, and the xitique is but one example of them having found solutions to their own problems.

Khongolote

This past Sunday was an exciting day for us because it marked our return to the church in Khongolote that we helped to build two years ago. We got to see it completed and being used for the first time.

Khongolote is best described as a suburb of Maputo. It is an area of very dry, red clay that the government set aside to relocate victims of Mozambique's severe flooding in 2000.

The satellite photo to the left shows the Khongolote property, and provides a flavour of this African suburb. It was taken three years ago, so doesn't include the new church building (to the lower right of the marker pin is the tent that the community had been using as a church building). Pictured above the marker is a preschool attended by over 100 children. I was on the site this morning working with Melvin Kelly (a construction engineer colleague from Northern Ireland) and two Mozambican nationals -- Belarmino and Carlos -- creating a sketch plan for a kitchen that the Mozambicans will build on the site in the coming months, funding permitting.


More Than A Church

This week, I have been working with several Mozambicans -- Raul, Ricardo and Alfredo (shown in the picture) -- on an experimental two-week long business training program for a group of 18 or so Mozambicans who expressed an interest in a pilot training program. (My role has been to encourage and support from alongside the leaders -- there are several good reasons for not standing up and doing the business training myself (aside from my lack of fluency in Portuguese), but I'll write more on the philosophy of sustainability in a future blog entry). It's exciting to me that the church in Khongolote has provided the stage for these two weeks of training.

We've also been conversing with Banco Opportunidade -- the local microcredit lending bank run by Opportunity International -- about the possibility of providing business loans for this group of trainees. Several months ago, my thinking about microcredit lending revolved around originating loans, but the reality is that I am only here for a short time and want to create persistent change. I've realized that I can have a greater impact by partnering with existing organizations and empowering Mozambicans, rather than reinventing the wheel at every turn -- and making mistake after mistake that others have already learned from.

Once these two weeks of experimentation have been completed, Glenn and I will evaluate its successes and failures, and will hopefully have inspired a couple of Mozambicans to start their own businesses in the process.


Homes in Khongolote

Driving to and from Khongolote every morning this week for the training sessions has provided me much time for questioning Raul, who has become my "cultural champion." Raul Manhica is a 28-year-old man who is living in Maputo with his older brother and family. Raul was born in Inhambane, a province just north of Maputo, until his parents were killed when he was just two years old. I wanted to ask more about his parents -- my guess is that they were killed during the country's civil war -- but the topic of conversation shifted to other things.

I asked Raul many questions about the housing in Khongolote as we drove through the village. I learned that the people who live in Khongolote are generally able to own their own homes, which are simple clay brick structures with tin roofs (stereotypically African reed-construction housing is still popular in Mozambique, but not in Khongolote, where there are no swamps for reeds to grow).

A basic starter home in Khongolote costs about $4,500 to build, for which you would get one or two bedrooms, a living area and a kitchen. The brick work would remain uncovered, and the washroom would be out back.

A fancier home, with an indoor washroom and plastered and painted brickwork (similar construction as the Khongolote church pictured above) could cost twice that much.

(Minimum wage in Mozambique was raised this year, to US$57/month for general labourers, and US$40/month for agricultural workers. Of course, many people are not fortunate enough to have jobs in the formal economy.)

A Special Thanks to the Berryman Family

We owe a special thanks to Glenn and Kris Berryman and their two daughters, Chelsea and Jessica. They picked us up at the airport a week and a half ago, and have opened their house to us as we've adjusted to life in Maputo. They took a lot of time out of their days to bring us to government offices, to teach me to drive, and get us acquainted with our new city.

I will be working closely with Glenn on the development of microenterprise initiatives, and Kris is a teacher at the same school as Laura (and, in fact, Laura is teaching both Chelsea and Jessica).

We moved out of the Berryman house yesterday afternoon, and moved in with Larry and Susan Weil, where we will stay until September, when our apartment is finally ready.

Mozambique's Colonial Roots

A couple of days before our departure, I was handed a book written by William Finnegan called A Complicated War: The Harrowing of Mozambique. It was given to me by a member of OMS’ board of directors – he was given it as a Father’s Day present this year, but thought my need for it was more pressing than his own.

It has proven to be an insightful account of Mozambique’s history, so I thought that I'd share some of it with you to provide a brief glimpse into the country that Laura and I will call home for the next 11 months or so.

Mozambique was, for many centuries until 1974, a colony of Portugal. To this day, it is strongly influenced – both positively and negatively – by this heritage. Finnegan writes:

The fact that some people scarcely realize they live in a country called Mozambique is, in light of the region’s colonial experience, unsurprising. Portugal, which declared the place an administrative unit to begin with, never had the wherewithal to turn it into anything of the kind.

The thought of living within a country’s boundaries without knowing anything of its governance – or even of the existence of a higher order of governance beyond one's own village – is astounding to me.

Throughout centuries of colonial rule, Mozambique was plundered for its gold, its ivory, and – most devastatingly – its labour:

In the nineteenth century, [the major international trade] was in slaves. Powerful slave-raiding states grew up, and the entire northern half of Mozambique was impoverished and almost depopulated as more than a million people were captured, sold, and shipped to Brazil, the United States, and the Caribbean islands.

Many of those who were fortunate enough to not have been kidnapped and sold into slavery were unable to benefit from their own labour nonetheless:

The South Africans agreed to pay part of the wages of Mozambican mineworkers directly to the Portuguese in gold. Since an average of 80,000 Mozambicans were working legally in the mines after 1910, these remittances became the mainstay of the colonial government’s budget.

This is Mozambique’s sad history of abuse, even before the nearly 30 years of war are taken into account (from 1964 to 1992 -- see The Scars Must Be Deep). As one BBC correspondent noted, “Mozambique is one of the poorest countries in Africa not because it lacks natural resources, nor because Portugal left it undeveloped, but rather because Portugal actively underdeveloped it.”

I’m hoping to hear stories from those who have actually lived some of the more recent of the country’s fascinating history to see glimpses of how it impacts their present lives.

All quotations are from William Finnegan, A Complicated War: The Harrowing of Mozambique (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

Culture Shock: Part II

I've often been warned of the onset of culture shock, but even as I had travelled abroad previously, I've always understood it to be primarily an intellectual experience -- a sort of "isn't that wierd" inconvenience, like the lack of sub sauce in Washington (see Culture Shock: Part I).

Though I don't profess to know the depth and breadth of culture shock yet, I now understand it to be less about inconveniences, and more a full frontal attack on one's sense of competence.

At home, we derive our confidence and comfort from a sense of competence -- a sense that, if I want to do something, I have the ability to go and do it -- and the independence that results from that competence. In a new culture, that sense of competence quickly dwindles.

At home, I was a fully-functioning, independent adult. By contrast, in Mozambique I have the competence of a young child. In the past couple of days:

• I needed assistance from my new friend, Glenn, to speak with a store clerk to purchase my own (fill in the blank: groceries, telephone, ...). Moreover, I needed his help to navigate government bureaucracy to complete our resident permit applications.

• I have met several Mozambicans -- Raul, Timoteo, Samuel, Juka, Ricardo -- but I can't move a conversation beyond basic pleasantries ("bon dia" and "obrigado") to get to know them, except with those who can speak broken English with me.

• Our laptop batteries died, but I couldn't recharge them since I didn't have an adapter to plug a North American plug into a Mozambican wall (a problem since resolved).

• I was dependent upon others for rides until yesterday, when I borrowed a car that wasn't being used -- and even now, I feel like I'm a new driver in the right-hand-drive car on roads where obeying rules is the exception and potholes are the rule.

Most of all, and perhaps punctuating my newly-perceived lack of competence that marks the onset of culture shock, is that my days aren't yet full, and I haven't even completely mapped out a game plan for the next year. Laura is at school right now in teacher training, where she probably has too much to do, and I'm feeling guilty for not being busy mid-way through our first week on the ground.

The truth is that I have quite purposefully declined several requests of my time (including successfully turning down the opportunity to teach at school, as reported in Jill-Of-All-Trades). I want to go slowly at first to make sure my time is targetted in the most effective direction, rather than filling up with good things that aren't my passion.

One chunk of my time will be devoted to language study. The past couple of days have reinforced the need for me to speak and understand a basic level of Portuguese in order to be as effective as possible in helping Mozambicans, and to rebuild the competence necessary to ward away culture shock. The challenge of learning a new language is somewhat lessened by the realization that, for most people here, Portuguese is a second language as well. Most Mozambicans first learned to speak a tribal language at home (Shangaan is popular in Maputo province), and only learned Portuguese as the "trade language" of Mozambique while in school. That experience makes them very patient and gracious teachers of language, thankfully.

Jill-Of-All-Trades

If you have ever spent time volunteering for something, you'll understand that feeling of getting in over your head -- not because you can't handle the job for which you volunteered, but because once you've volunteered for one thing, you'll be asked to do more and more and more...

Today, Glenn and Kris (our hosts) took us by the school where Laura will be teaching so that she could speak with the school's director, get her schedule and books, and start preparing for the school year that begins next Tuesday.

What she found out is that she's been asked to teach eight full-year classes:

• Grades 9 & 10 Earth Science
• Grades 7 & 8 Science
• Grade 9 Geometry
• Grade 10 Algebra
• Grade 6 Math
• Grade 7 Math
• Grades 11 & 12 Statistics and Trigonometry
• Grades 11 & 12 Chemistry

The school director piled her high with textbooks, workbooks, problem books, and other various who-knows-what books that Laura will sort through over the coming days. She's feeling a little overwhelmed tonight, but reading "Rookie Teaching for Dummies" (which she found on Kris' book shelf) is helping.

(To be honest, I'm not sure how helpful the book is, but it's proving to be a great stress-reliever. Every page or two, Laura breaks out into laughter. The most recent example is a section called "Wacky Hall Passes", in which the author recounts some of his favourites that he's used, including a six-foot-tall cardboard cut-out of Captain Picard that the poor kids had to drag to the 'loo. Hopefully it wasn't an emergency!)

A week before starting, the school is still trying to plug up some teacher vacancies. While I was there with Laura today, they tried throwing some of those vacancies at me to see if they'd stick. It was easy for me to say no to kindergarden. They were more serious about mid-level math and English classes, but that's really not my passion. Let's hope they're not too persistent -- and if they are, they might just see some kid running down the hall in a few weeks from now with a six-foot-tall cardboard cutout in tow.