Samuel Redux

You may remember Samuel, the micro-entrepreneur barber profiled here last month. This weekend, we got to know Samuel the student: same Samuel, different role.

Samuel knocked on our door in search of Laura, hoping that she might be able to tutor him in calculus. She willingly accepted, setting aside nearly three hours that followed to coach Samuel to a greater understanding of mathematics.

Since African society is based so heavily on relationships, we also spent considerable time just talking and getting to know him a bit better.

(As an aside, I've often been told that when I leave Mozambique, I will measure my success by the tangible results that I achieve, but that Mozambicans will measure my success by the relationships that have been built.)

Samuel is 22 (I had guessed mid- to late-20s -- I was wrong) and is finishing his last year of high school this year. The school year runs in-line with the calendar year, so he'll start final exams in November.

If he doesn't pass an exam, he has to wait a year to re-write it.

(We've heard rumours that passing an exam in Mozambique too often requires payment of bribes or worse. Samuel didn't mention anything of the sort. When reflecting back upon his failed Portuguese exam of the year before, he commented only that he felt that he had done better, but that Portuguese must be more difficult than he had thought.)

Students in Mozambique have only a couple hours of instruction each day to allow for more "efficient" utilization of physical capital: typically three or four levels of classes will meet in succession in the same building, each for about three hours a day.

Despite this, Samuel's calculus curriculum is roughly equivalent to what Laura learned at her Canadian high school. Here, it seems, students are given the basic principles and are made to sink or swim on their own. I have yet to see anyone with a textbook for any subject.

As Samuel made his way to the door, we wished him "good luck." He didn't understand what we meant, so we translated into Portuguese. Boa sorte. He still looked puzzled. "Luck is when you are walking down the street and find money," he said.

He continued his thought, "The only two areas in which people really need luck are opportunity and capacity. If you're lucky in these two areas, you'll be successful in any other area of importance."

Opportunity and capacity. Very insightful, I thought. Too often in Canada we consider even these two areas to be fully within our control.

Samuel considers himself lucky on the first account. After his father died when Samuel was only five, his older brother travelled 1,200 kilometres north to pick him up in Nampula Province, brought him back to Maputo City and took him in. For the next 15 years, the brother-turned-father made the sacrifices required to ensure that Samuel was properly nourished and educated. These are significant sacrifices in Mozambique, and sacrifices for which Samuel is grateful.

After high school, Samuel wants to study agriculture and then return to his birth place of Nampula. First he needs to pass his exams and be accepted into university.

Laura surmised that Samuel was lucky on the capacity front, too. He picked up calculus fairly easily. A bright young man.

We realized that wishing someone "luck" is sort of strange, particularly for an endeavour that requires so much hard work and preparation. On his second attempt for the door, we changed our tack and conveyed our hope that Samuel would do well on his exams.

Once he was gone, we quietly hoped that he would do well in life, as well. He certainly seems to have had the good fortune of opportunity and capacity thusfar.

Fala portuguêse, por favor!

There are a lot of difficult things about engaging a new culture, but perhaps none so difficult and confidence-testing as learning a foreign language.

Laura and I have been working hard to learn Portuguese. For me, it's a part of my daily routine. I am attending one-on-one classes three days a week, and spending two days a week conversing with Mario, a Mozambican national, for practice.

I also try watching the news, though I pick up little of what is said, and attend meetings in Portuguese for practice. I have a grade four history reader that I am working through, which has provided good cultural learning as well as language learning.

I can understand a handful of words, and can speak even fewer.

I sometimes wish that I had have spent more time learning Portuguese before I came here, and other times wish that I could just "download" the new language, Matrix-style.

Laura has been very busy at her English-language high school, but has found two hours a week to meet with a woman who is teaching her as well.

Language learning is certainly tough slogging. It may very well be one of the most difficult things I've ever had to do.

Of course, I'm making progress. Last week, I successfully went to a photocopier store on my own and asked how much it would cost to photocopy an entire spiral-bound notebook, and then proceeded to ask the clerk to do so. All in Portuguese. A small victory.

It takes much time and energy to learn a language, and I've been trained to expect immediate results. Why am I not fluent in just five weeks? The truth is, I should be happy to be conversant in a couple of months.

I have sat in on several classes offered by the local Maputo City Church to teach English to Mozambican nationals. I have heard the people in that class labour over the pronunciation of words, seen them scratch their heads in search of their meanings, wrestle with verb conjugation, and struggle to express themselves in a brand new language. They see great opportunity in learning English, and are extremely motivated learners. I rarely hear a word of Portuguese in those classes.

What an example they set for me as I learn Portuguese!

I have also come to realize that learning Portuguese is an exercise that pays dividends far beyond the direct benefit of being able to speak with people in their language. Mozambicans respect us for taking an interest in their culture, and for investing the time needed to develop language skills.

The bridge that is built through this learning experience is a healthy one: Mozambicans have the opportunity of seeing us in a position of weakness relative to themselves. They get to see the wealthy foreigner struggle.

The relationships that will blossom as a result of this struggle will be well worth the effort, I trust.

Tangled in Red Tape

The lesson that I learned today is that, in this society, bureaucracy abounds. It's everywhere, not just in government.

My experience started when the intake line on our water heater sprung a leak, squirting water onto the electrical wire, resulting in some pretty decent fireworks -- a little scary since our water heater is right in our bathroom. Naturally, I had to do some plumbing work to sort the problem out.

It took two people, a hammer and vice grips to get the broken intake line off the wall, but that's just an aside. The real lesson started when I had to go to the hardware store to buy a little adapter so that I could fasten a female-end steel braided hose to a female-end water line.

Inside the hardware store, I was greeted by a man behind a counter. "Can I help you, please?" he said, or something like that in Portuguese. Knowing that I'd have a hard enough time trying to explain what I needed in English, let alone Portuguese, I came equipped with the old broken parts and asked for a pen and paper to draw a diagram.

"Oh, yes," the man understood what I was looking for. He went in the back and got one. Perfect, I said. So he took it away and wrote the name on a piece of paper. He pointed toward another counter.

I handed the piece of paper to a man behind the new counter, who looked at it and wrote the part number on another scrap of paper and pointed at a third counter.

The man at the third counter typed the part number into a computer and sent an invoice to a printer sitting beside a woman at a fourth counter.

I wish I were joking.

At the fourth counter, the lady asked me to pay. I realized that I didn't even have the part yet, so I protested. Silly estrangeiro. Of course I don't have the part yet. Once I paid, I brought the invoice back to the man who first helped me, who went to some shelves in the back to retrieve the part that I needed (again), got his supervisor to sign and stamp the invoice, and gave the package to me.

Four counters and six employees later, I was thankful to have the $0.60 part in my hand. And Laura was thankful to have hot water again.

Seeking Cultural Common Ground

In order to be as effective as possible in Mozambique, it is imperative that we develop a strong understanding of African culture. Toward this end, I have found a book called “African Friends and Money Matters” by David Maranz to be surprisingly helpful.

Let me share some cultural insights that I have realized while reading this book.

First off, many of Africa’s cultural attributes regarding their treatment of money make sense only within their historical context.

Many African cultures did not have any need for money until their colonizers came and required that they pay taxes to the colonial rulers. These taxes had to be paid in the colonial ruler’s currency. Mozambicans were no longer independent. They were required to take Portuguese jobs to earn Portuguese currency to pay Portuguese taxes. As a result, money is seen with a certain degree of contempt; it was introduced to extract power and resources from the continent.

Secondly, for various political and climactic reasons, Africa has endured severe poverty. By and large, Africans do not share Westerners’ belief that they can live independent lives. Life is not a competitive race, but rather a cooperative, interdependent struggle. Survival requires the maintenance of a large safety net of family and friends.

“The ideal of unity in all things … [means that] being the richest man does not necessarily give status. Status is gained by willingness to share the riches with other people” (Maranz, p. 60).

This cooperative spirit of African culture is founded upon the assumption of reciprocity – that I’ll help you with your need today because tomorrow it might be me who is in need.

Introducing Westerners into the equation creates tension on the system for one fundamental reason: the assumption of reciprocity breaks down. In the Westerner’s eye, the African keeps asking for more and more and more. In all likelihood, the African will never be in the position to repay our gifts because we’ll never be in need relative to them.

Because of our relative wealth, the relationship is one-sided. We cannot be fully integrated into this culture without completely cutting ties to our financial and social networks in the West.

Africa’s cooperative spirit has several additional consequences that further strain the relationship between Western and African culture. For instance:

• Africans believe that assets not being used are available for others to use. This makes sense within their context: if there is not an excess of resources in general, then someone having more than needed means that someone else is in need.
  
  In fact, Africans believe that resources are to be used, not hoarded, and that hoarding is a selfish and unsocial act. Why keep for tomorrow what someone else needs today?
  
  In the West, we have a deeply-entrenched sense of individual property rights. What is mine is mine, and only becomes yours if I explicitly give (or sell) it to you. We tend to view Africans’ reciprocity as tantamount to theft.

• As a counter-measure to the above point, Africans often store their wealth in immoveable assets, such as partially-built houses, rather than liquid assets such as bank account balances.
  
  To illustrate this point, one of my African colleagues, Raul, had been saving to get married, but was forced to postpone in part because his brother had a more urgent need for his savings. Now, Raul has accumulated just enough money to build one wall of a house for himself. To avoid his savings being taken again, he wants to build this wall now rather than waiting until he has enough money to build the entire house.
  
  Mozambique is littered with partially-built but already-occupied homes.
  
  In the West, we tend to view these piles of cement block and protruding rebar with a touch of contempt as the fruit of poor planning.

• Sharing resources is the basis for many friendships in Africa, since doing so is vital to survival.
  
  By contrast, Westerners tend to distrust relationships that are based upon (or even involve) the sharing of financial resources. A friendship based on money is no friendship at all, most of us would believe.
  

• Africans tend to be hospitable, sharing their resources spontaneously with those within their social sphere, but tend not to be charitable beyond their known world.
  
  Westerners tend to be charitable, sharing considerable wealth in a planned, anonymous fashion, often using large organizations as conduits for our generosity. We tend to be hospitable only to a point: meals are often shared amongst family and friends, but financial resources are only seldom shared within families and rarely with friends or neighbours.

All of this points boil down into the following understanding to which I’m coming to be aware: Westerners living in Africa tend to look at Africans and interpret their constant requests for money and open-ended “borrowing” of assets as greedy and self-seeking; Africans looking at Westerners, meanwhile, see our very different cultural patterns – our constant planning and budgeting and our weariness of requests for money from friends – as being greedy and self-seeking as well.

Two very different approaches, viewed with the same suspicious interpretation by two very different groups. Ironic, isn’t it?

In Trouble with the Law

We've been told that there are two things that are inevitable when driving in Mozambique: getting in an accident and getting stopped by the police.

Today, the inevitable happened.

Being stopped by the police in Mozambique, where corruption is commonplace, is a unique experience.

For the most part, police officers in Mozambique are on foot. The police department has a few vehicles, but they are generally pick-up trucks filled with patrolmen, delivering police officers to their respective beats. The officers that stopped me today did so by waving at me from the side of the road.

They seemed so non-threatening that I pointed at myself ("who, me?"), and when they nodded I quickly considered which pedal to press. Stopping would be the right thing to do, but the officers are on foot, so what were they going to do? When the answer "shoot" popped into my head, I did what I was likely going to do anyway: pull over and stop.

The lead officer leaned down into my window and said something in Portuguese. I made an assumption, and pulled out my documentation. When he didn't seem interested in it, I told him that eu não falo portuguêse. He could speak a little English.

He told me that he would follow me to the police station (when he walked around and tugged on my passenger door handle, I quickly realized that in his broken English, what he really meant to say is that he would sit beside me while I drove there.) His partner hopped in the back seat.

I later learned that I shouldn't ever need to drive a police officer to the station.

Soon, he told me that the fine for what I did was 2.5 million meticais -- about $100 dollars, which seemed steep for Mozambique, but in line with Canadian standards, and who am I to argue with the law anyway?

I later learned that such a fine is far too high.

We drove a couple of blocks, and then he said something again. I didn't understand exactly, but something about "half." We could settle this without going to the station for half the fine. I knew that I only had about 300,000 meticais in my wallet, so I wasn't afraid to pull it out to show him. He was clearly disappointed. He was even more disappointed when I pulled out my empty pockets and assured him that there wasn't more hidden in the car, either.

He discussed his options with his partner, took my money, and hopped out of the car. I had just paid my very first bribe to a government official in a third-world country.

I later learned that the officers wearing green sweaters (as these gentlemen were) are pedestrian police, and don't even have the authority to stop a car.

Next time I'll know better. I'll still stop, even if I think they don't have the authority to pull me over. But next time, I'll ask them for a receipt.

An Emergency Vacation

This weekend, Laura and I made a break for it -- a run for the border. We hadn't planned on going to South Africa this weekend, and in fact only booked our hotel the night before leaving. Twenty-four hours before standing at the border, we weren't even allowed to leave Mozambique because our resident visas hadn't been approved yet.

The emergency was that our (borrowed) car was having trouble. The only garage our colleagues trust is in Nelspruit, South Africa. It's not a completely comfortable feeling knowing that we had to drive 220 kilometres in a car whose state of repair was questionable, but even in need of repair, the 2000 Toyota Sprinter that we've borrowed is in the upper quartile of cars on the road. (The bottom quartile consists of cars that have either long since been abandoned at the side of the road, or should have been.)

On Wednesday morning, I went to the immigration office to see if our resident visas were approved. They were and -- a near-miracle, I'm told -- a week earlier than promised. We left on Thursday morning for Nelspruit.

South Africa was at once familiar and not familiar -- comfortable and not. People spoke English, yet didn't understand our accent automatically. We still felt like foreigners, not completely able to let our guards down.

Ferdi the mechanic looked at our car Friday morning. It turned out that the awful screeching noise was caused by some metal something-or-other that was bent and rubbing against another something-or-other. Ferdi handled the repair himself, and charged us 90 rand (about $12) for his trouble. A small part of me would have felt a little more assured that our car was road-worthy again had he charged 900 rand instead.

With a clean bill of health on the car, Laura and I headed north into the mountains of Sabie. Laura wanted to stop to get a photo of the sign saying that we could really drive 120 km/h on the narrow, winding two-lane mountain roads. She didn't fully understand just how crazy that speed "limit" was until she was standing at the side of the road snapping a photo -- the transport truck that whizzed by shook the car and startled the photographer.

Once in Sabie, we spent some time admiring Sabie Falls (taking lots of photos -- some of which are included here) and looking in some gift shops before returning to Nelspruit for dinner.

We headed back towards Mozambique on Saturday morning, intent on spending some time in Kruger Park before coming home. Laura was disappointed that we didn't stop, but is already planning a time when we can make our stay worthwhile. After all, we've been in Africa for six weeks and have yet to see African wildlife.

Searching for Balance

I was given a preview copy of a report prepared by a Mennonite economic development association in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme. The two organizations studied the micro-credit industry in Mozambique and concluded that the high interest rates that I have observed in my sampling of micro-credit banks are indeed the market rates in Mozambique.

I arranged a meeting with a gentleman from Banco Oportunidade to talk about their high rates and what, if anything, we could do to mitigate the underlying risks to bring the rates down for the specific borrowers that we have in mind. He was a very pleasant man, and I’m appreciative that he took the time to meet with me, but the meeting bore little fruit.

He confirmed their high rates (which are in the ballpark of 100 per cent per annum), and indicated that they are likely to stay high for the foreseeable future, citing the need to generate a profit in spite of economic factors (high inflation, currency devaluation) and the high cost structure of running such an organization. I could not help but to wonder if some of those costs were excessive.

He also closed the door to any form of partnership, at least for now. Don’t call us; we’ll call you, perhaps in a year’s time.

We have specific people who want to start specific businesses. Two men want to start a papeleria where the community could come to make photocopies and type out official documents; a woman wants to start a bakery that specializes in cakes for celebrations.

Traditional banks will not lend money to these people because they want to borrow too small an amount of money to be worthwhile, and have no physical collateral or dependable income to back a loan anyway.

The established micro-credit community will not lend money to them since they are not borrowing money to capitalize an existing business. Even the micro-credit lenders want to see a track record of success in business. Our potential borrowers do not want to borrow from the bank because of their high interest rates.

What can we do to help them?

The first obvious answer is to reach into my pocket and lend them my own money at interest rates that are morally justifiable (a subjective test, to be sure). There are many problems with this approach, not least of which is what consequences to use in the event of default that I, as lender, would really be willing to implement.

The biggest problem is that such a model is not sustainable. My money would quickly run out, and building the necessary infrastructure to lend others' money would require more than a year to build up.

Until recently, I’ve been holding sustainability up as if it were the Holy Grail. Maybe it would be more valuable to simply help someone today. Maybe the objective should be to improve one life at a time, and leave worrying about tomorrow for tomorrow.

I’m reminded of a story by Loren Eiseley called “The Star Thrower,” which was paraphrased to me for the first time by a gentleman named Frank Pretorius in South Africa two years ago:

A young man was jogging down the beach one morning when he saw an old man ahead of him bend down, pick up a starfish and throw it into the sea.

As he approached, the young man asked, “What are you doing?”

The old man answered, “There was a storm last night that washed many starfish high up onto the beach. If I don’t throw them back, the sun will kill them by noon.”

The young man laughed and said, “You are a foolish old man. The beach is miles long and there are thousands of starfish stranded on it. You can’t get to them all before the sun dries them out and kills them. What you are doing, old man, just doesn’t matter.”

The old man picked up another starfish and threw it into the safety of the waves. “It mattered to that one!” he replied.

This old guy's approach isn't sustainable. It's not helping the starfish to help themselves, and it can't easily be scaled up to help all of the starfish, but it is helping a few of them through their immediate crisis.

My struggle is where to set the balance between immediate impact and sustainable improvement.

Will providing Mozambicans with a source of income for today create a longer-term dependence?

If I give a man a fish, he might become dependent on me for the next one. If I teach him to fish, on the other hand, he might starve trying to learn.

What is the right balance? My quest for an answer continues...

Home, Sweet Home

Yesterday, for the first time in 66 days, Laura and I unpacked our suitcases.

We’re grateful for the hosts that we’ve had over the past two months (most recently Larry and Susan Weil and their cat, Felix), but are certainly glad to be able to relax in our own space for the remaining ten months.

We have moved into an apartment that is not too dissimilar to any apartment in any urban area back in Canada. As in any new home, we are still adjusting to some unusual sounds and smells. The electricity is a little unsteady, so the lights take a little while to come to life, and the water running from the taps isn’t potable, but those are minor inconveniences. There’s a gas stove fed by a butane cylinder sitting on the floor beside it, which makes us feel a little like we’re camping every time we strike a match to make something for dinner.

Africans needn’t maintain the same sharp distinction between “inside” and “outside” as we do in Canada, since the snow never flies here. On the balcony, there is both a laundry machine and a “water closet” in the truest sense of the term: the whole room serves as the shower stall, with the shower head positioned such that one could literally have a shower while sitting on the john, though I would imagine that doing so would result in the toilet paper being a little more soggy than is my preference (for those less adventuresome souls who may be planning a visit, we do have more typically North American facilities inside the apartment, with better water pressure than our first shower experience).

The most unsettling part about life in Maputo is the need for security. Our apartment is surrounded with metal grates over every possible opening, including our three balconies. We secure the front gate with two heavy padlocks. This is Mozambique’s version of a screen door.

Our previous homes have been surrounded by walls or fences topped with razor wire. (Those who can’t afford razor wire make due with shards of glass from broken bottles fixed atop their walls with mortar.) Our previous homes have also had guards – not trained, uniformed soldiers carrying weapons, but boys whose job it is to open the gate when the patrão (boss) arrives and to provide a general presence around the house, for whatever that’s worth.

Some businesses have real guards with uniforms and menacing-looking guns. I’ve often wondered how many of those guns really work, but I suspect (and hope!) that my question will remain unanswered.

Our front gate and padlocks help us to feel safe. Most of the noise around us comes from children playing in neighbouring apartments. From in here, in many ways, the reality of Africa seems very far away.