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.