Break the Rules!

In an effort to avoid erecting barriers to the success of our program, I wrote that we would avoid doing things that Mario and Samuel cannot replicate on their own when I'm gone. That was last week.

This week, Glenn and I broke the rules in a big, exciting way. I brought Mario and Samuel to Nampula, a province in northern Mozambique, to show them a village-based savings and loan project being administered completely by Mozambicans.

Our desire in doing so was to demonstrate our commitment to the program by investing in them as its coordinators, to create momentum to kick off their new jobs, and most importantly, to inspire them to see what Mozambicans can accomplish on their own. Through the trip, Glenn and I wanted to help them to cast a vision for themselves of what they could accomplish back home in Maputo.

And we had some fun along the way, as well.

Nampula is Samuel's birthplace, but he left when he was 6, in the midst of civil war, and hasn't been back since. He could understand a few words of Makua, the local tribal language, but not many. Mario had never been on an airplane before, though used to spend a lot of time at the airport with his father, before he passed away, watching flights coming in and going out.

Once in Nampula, we rented a four-by-four, and quickly realized the wisdom of our decision. Many of the roads that we drove on were hazardous on the best of days, but we didn't have the luxury of those "best" days. It rained every afternoon of our trip, and the roads became slippery, muddy paths carved out of the wilderness.

At one point, as we drove down a slippery incline, we squeezed our way past a bus stranded in the ditch to our left, and a pickup similarly ensconced to our right. The hole that we drove through was so tight that the driver of the misfortuned pickup had to roll down his window and fold in his side mirror for us to pass.

We were informed that there is no such thing as a street map for the city of Nampula, the capital city, so there was no hope of a map to guide us from one village to the next. "As long as you've got a car, you've got accommodation," were the wise words of one of my colleagues back in Maputo. He thought he was kidding at the time, and so did I, until we tried driving from the district of Ribaue back to Nampula, and somehow ended up in Mecuburi instead. I had noticed only one possible turn in our four-hour journey, and by the time we realized we were lost, that one turn was was an hour or two in the muddy darkness behind us, so we pulled off the road into someone's field and camped for the night.

For their hospitality we offered them a tree limb full of bananas -- perhaps a hundred of them -- that we were given the previous day and couldn't possibly have eaten all by ourselves.

(That night, I thought I stepped on a thorn -- my foot stung like I had stepped on something sharp. Little did I know, a jigger flea had taken up residence in the bottom of my foot, making a nest and laying a bunch of eggs. As the doctor cut a small hole in my foot and cleaned them out, he showed us pictures of the painful sores that often inflict barefooted children that come into his office with similar, but much more severe, infestations.)

We spent hours and hours in that rented car, kept from weariness by the sight of dozens of people walking, from sunrise to sunset, along the same muddy paths pulling their loads by bicycle or atop their heads to the market like yoked oxen. Seeing their daily plight, our chore paled.

And, in one- or two-hour snippets of time between nearly 900km of mostly treacherous driving, we witnessed the value that village-based savings and loan programs are providing to tens of thousands of rural Africans.

We broke the rules in a big way this past week, and I hope that it was a valuable investment. On Monday morning, we'll try to restore the discipline of no cars, no computers, no certificates. And no airplanes or rental cars, either.