Seeds Begin to Sprout

On Sunday, Laura and I packed into a Land Cruiser and headed for a church in Intaca, a small rural community about an hour outside of Maputo. The entire excursion was about six hours long, much of which was driving along abusive muddy roads and narrow thornbush-lined footpaths.

It would have taken less time had we known exactly where to go, but with roads that don't have names, in a village that doesn't have maps, in a community spotted with caniço home after caniço home, everything looks the same. And all roads seemed to lead to one particular building with peeling white paint.

From that intersection, we tried every possible direction. Straight, left, right -- every attempt led back to that familiar peeling white paint. Frustration mounted as everybody in the car had different advice on where to turn next. It didn't take long to realize that everybody was long on opinions but short on knowledge.

Once we had finally extricated ourselves from the quagmire of muddy paths, we found Intaca church. We were very late, but church hadn't yet started. In fact, nobody seemed to know what time it was supposed to start; people start walking from their homes when they hear that singing has started. Olga, the pastor's wife, gave us a tour of a sewing training centre that she and her husband operate.

Laura and I wanted to visit Intaca because Olga and her husband Ricardo are looking for ways to partner with Semente Para A Comunidade -- the Portuguese name that Mario and Samuel gave to our economic development program -- to increase the number of sewing machines that they have in order to meet demand for their training program.

These sewing machines are the old-fashioned peddle kind that don't require electricity. The women use them to learn to make school uniforms for their children and decorative linens to sell in local markets.

* * * * *

Mario and Samuel hitched a ride with us part-way. They were headed to Khongolote church to invite congregants to an inaugural village-based savings and loan program meeting next Saturday. Because they asked, I decided that we could again break the rules and give them a ride, saving them a two- or three-hour minibus ride. But I didn't want to be at the church for the meeting: it is their program. Afterwards, Mario and Samuel reported significant interest from the church.

Another opportunity for the Semente Para A Comunidade program (which literally means Seed for the Community, reflecting the potential for economic growth) started taking root when Samuel recently met with a local bakery run by a Christian woman. She is tired of employees who cheat and steal, and whose drinking the night before makes their morning work less than productive. She is looking for opportunities to partner with Semente to provide employment opportunities to church members. Samuel and Mario, through the Semente program, would be responsible for providing Biblically-based moral standards training.

These ideas are slightly divergent from what I had originally envisioned for the program, but that doesn't make them bad. They provide an avenue for the church to be a good witness to the community; they also conform with the program's vision of removing barriers to economic development for church members.

These are the exciting ideas that spring up when Mozambicans are empowered to have control over their own program rather than merely being implementing agents of a foreignly-concocted scheme.

Sitting On My Hands

My morning plans have been thwarted. I was planning on going with Samuel and Mario to a series of meetings with important people in Khongolote, where they are implementing the first village-based savings and loan program. Mario and Samuel have been making their rounds, going from government office to government office, trying to get approvals here and permits there.

In Mozambique, it's a bad idea to begin any project without the knowledge and support of each community's government leaders.

Samuel and Mario have been surprised by the amount of bureaucratic red tape, but the area administrators have been receiving them well. One administrator told them of some people who started "a development project" in their community a couple of months ago: in that case, the good Samaritan went from door to door collecting money ostensibly to start a loan portfolio, but trousered the money and vanished. Past experience has proven that the government is right to be cautious.

Back on the subject of these important meetings, it would have been good stroking for my ego to be able to go. Meeting with government leaders would have made me feel important, even valuable. I am, like most people, just insecure enough that I need to define myself by what I do. But yesterday, Mario suggested that he and Samuel should go to the meetings without me.

Some part of me -- that little good angel sitting over my right shoulder -- was quite pleased. I want them to risk being independent, to have the courage to work on their own. They'll need to once I'm gone, so it's great that they want to start now.

Just underneath Mario's bravery, he's timid. He's not entirely convinced that he's up to the job, and would like Glenn or I to be there for support; to be there to answer difficult questions. But he also had the insight to recognize that the belligerent response that we have received from community and church leaders at past meetings is a function of our presence. He believes that, because Westerners have come with pockets overflowing with money in the past, perpetuating the culture of dependency, that the community won't be happy with anything less than a handout this time as well -- as long as I'm sitting in the meeting as a symbol of that dependency.

"When they see Samuel and I," he said by contrast, "they don't see money, they see reality. They see that we [Mozambicans] need to work to get what we want."

For the sake of the program's success, Mario wanted to take a risk. To remove the safety net. Just like he'll be forced to in two months from now, when Glenn and I have returned home.

I want the program to be successful too, but that little red devil sitting over my left shoulder is busy pitching coal into the furnace, stoking the fire of my ego. If I'm not there, nobody will know that it's my project. Nobody will understand the valuable contribution that I made, or give me the respect that I deserve. Nobody will...

But it's their project, not mine. I have been temporarily inserted into their story to light a fire, but it's their fire to maintain. It's their story. I will soon exit, and they will continue to live it.

The challenge with my empowerment approach is that making myself dispensable means that I'm, well, dispensable. I am successful if I am not needed. The more successful Glenn and I are at mentoring and advising Mario and Samuel, the more I am forced to sit on my hands.

That's not an easy thing to do for those of us who find identity in hard work. But we must acknowledge that our Western results-orientation is, at times, bordering on idolatrous. I'm practicing idolatry when I act not in order to help, but to make myself feel important, or less guilty, or useful. In these situations, my work has become my god: that thing above which there is nothing else.

I could be sitting in another meeting, dragging it along, forcing my opinion, influencing the direction of thought. Making myself busy. In the great words of Paul, such people "are not busy; they are busybodies." (2 Thessalonians 3:11).

So today I'm sitting on my hands, not doing anything to advance this project. And if I want this project to outlive my stay in Mozambique, to build something truly lasting in only a year, sitting on my hands is exactly what I need to be doing.

Mario and Samuel will do a great job without me.

Caught in the Middle

Mario and Samuel had their first encounter with the orange-eating group of oppositionist church leaders. That the leaders agreed to allow them to come to the meeting at all was a small victory, considering that they have been rebuffing me since the fall. I'll accept that as a tiny morsel of evidence that our nationals-first strategy of implementing this program is working: with Mario and Samuel in the lead, we were finally granted another hearing.

Of course, that we were granted another hearing is not to say that the leaders were completely ready to accept our ideas. The leaders provided our two new program coordinators with the same impassioned drubbing that they had given me.

Mario expressed afterwards that, despite our warnings, he was unprepared for their combativeness.

Samuel, who had been part of that very leadership team before accepting the current assignment, knew what he was up against but was still disheartened by their reaction. He understood the drive behind their bordering-on-belligerent behaviour, but now sees it as plain old selfishness.

They were, in a sense, caught between us, their employers, and them, their compatriots.

Mario and Samuel shared with the leaders the village-based savings and loan program that we learned about on our trip to Nampula. They explained that they see this program as a foundation that will serve to build up the financial capital necessary to successfully implement other programs: micro-enterprise training, chicken farm franchises, and more.

The unhappy leaders recycled their old complains: they don't want to save their own money, and they don't want loans. They want us to give them money with as few strings attached as possible. Preferably none, please.

But they would like to participate in the first group. I guess that's a sort of back-handed endorsement that they see merit in the idea, even if it's not their first choice.

Perhaps the best news of the day came afterwards, when Mario and Samuel expressed that they remain convinced that what they witnessed in Nampula would be positively received by communities here in Maputo, and are determined to march forward.

They have identified an ally among the group of leaders, and are intent on implementing a pilot project in his community sometime in the first half of April. The clock is ticking...

There's Room in the Inn -- But That's All!

In preparation for our trip to Nampula, I knew that we would have difficulty balancing my first-world expectations with Mario and Samuel's African standards. Any hotel that we selected, I thought, is likely to be below my standards and above theirs.

Despite some trepidation over the conditions that I would face, I wanted Samuel and Mario to be responsible for making decisions, including where we would stay.

Our first night was spent in a small community called Ribaue. We stayed in the only accommodation that we could find, which cost us $4 each. My anxiety lightened as I heard the responses to questions that Mario and Samuel asked: "Yes, the hotel has private washrooms," was the reply to their first question.

Of course, my anxiety wasn't in retreat for long. I soon learned that this is not the same as having a washroom in my room: what they really meant to say was yes, our communal washrooms have doors on them. And I soon learned that those doors latched closed by the strength of a bent nail hammered into the door frame.

"Does the hotel have water?" Mario asked next.

"Yes," was the simple response, which (foolishly) was enough for me. The hotel has water! (Wait a second. Is it usual to ask if a hotel has water?) What I didn't yet realize was that "having water" and "having running water" are two completely different standards, neither one of which I would even think to ask. Asking about the availability of potable water -- now that's something I would think to ask in rural Africa, but of this there was little room for doubt. There would be no potable water and there was no running water. The flimsy-doored washrooms down the hall were equipped with a bucket filled with the cold water of an open, hand-dug well out back, qualifying its proprietors to indicate that, yes, they have water.

I was starting to get the picture that luxury this was not when having sheets on the bed was the next feature described to us.

And that the mosquito net hanging above my bed would be a suitable deterrent, unless, of course, the mosquitoes were clever enough to find any of the dozen or so gaping tears in its side. (Mosquitoes in Mozambique, as it turns out, are rather clever.)

Despite the shock of being plunged into rural Africa, I slept mighty well that night after a long day of travel.

* * * * *

The hotel we stayed at for the last two nights of our Nampula adventure was closer to my standards (though the fact that we had a room at all was enough after our night of the cramped, sweltering faux-luxury of our pickup truck). At $20 a night, it was a little steep for Mario and Samuel, but they had difficulty finding other options.

This hotel, they grinned majestically as they told me, had cable television and running water! Heated running water, we later learned, which made my colleagues feel like they had hit upon the big time.

The only thing that it was missing was a reliable supply of electricity. We were in the comfort of heaven. What, after all, do we need lights for when we're trying to sleep?

The Widow's Mite

I asked several groups to rank in the order of importance to them the three components of a typical village-based savings and loan program: savings, credit and something called the "social fund." I was surprised to hear that, in each instance, the participants cited the social fund as being the single most important aspect of the program.

This was not intuitive for me: we had begun researching these types of groups as a way of eliminating some of the barriers to micro-enterprise development created by microcredit lenders and other organizations. I had thought that credit would be the most important, followed by savings (but even then, that savings only existed to provide sufficient capital for the credit program), and then the social fund a distant last.

The social fund (we might call it a benevolent fund) is not only a small self-insurance fund, but a way to build social cohesion within the group and community by allowing members to respond quickly to emergencies.

"The social fund is most important to us," one woman explained simply, "because through it we can help one another."

Here's how the fund works:

Every week when the group comes together to deposit savings, each member is required first to make a small deposit into the "social fund." The group decides how much is appropriate, but 1 metical per week (about $0.04) was typical. This social fund grows slowly, increasing by perhaps $1 a week.

If someone isn't able to scrape together the required contribution, they could simply make a double contribution the following week.

The social fund adds a degree of complexity to the program that I wasn't sure was warranted by its meager benefits. To be honest, I thought that the idea was a little silly. Meeting after meeting, the women and men who participated in these groups chipped away at my erroneous assumption. Had it not been for their overwhelming enthusiasm, I would have suggested scrapping the peripheral program as a needless distraction.

I dared ask a question that would never occur to me at home in Canada, but seemed obvious from my then-vantage point sitting on a caniço mat under a shelter built with mortar excreted from termites and a leaky thatch roof: is it difficult to save one metical per week?

The tone of the lady's voice who responded suggested that her answer was obvious: yes, of course it is. "But," she continued, "contributing to the social fund is a habit. I put aside enough money every week, just like I do for food."

The group collectively decides when to draw on the fund. All of the women I spoke with lit up when they recounted their ability to purchase medication for a neighbour's sick child, or to make simple funeral preparations for a deceased spouse, or respond to other unexpected events.

These families, living in rural southern Africa, are so poor that they could not otherwise afford a trip to a hospital room that would save the life of a child, even if that trip costs under $1.

These groups are community-based, not church-based, and many members are not Christians. Some are Muslim, others hold traditional beliefs. Regardless of their beliefs, the members of the group demonstrated over and over again what it would look like to have God's kingdom realized here on Earth.

Yes, every week through these groups, God's Kingdom is made real in rural Africa by women and men who can scarcely afford to eat, yet can spare an extra mite to help a neighbour in need. Every one of them makes their deposit hoping that they can help a neighbour, but knowing that it could very well be their own family that requires emergency aid this week.

Grassroots Banking

While in Nampula, Mario, Samuel and I met up with 10 groups of men and women, perhaps 200 people, who all expressed to us the benefit that has been brought to their lives through something called village-based savings and loan programs. These were 200 of the 27,000 people involved in such groups throughout Mozambique, and over half a million around the world.

There is no need to reinvent the wheel when such a proven methodology can be borrowed and implemented in our own communities of influence.

We wanted to travel to Nampula to observe some of these groups first-hand, to evaluate for ourselves whether or not they are having an impact on the lives of their members. And person after person, story after story, confirmed that the benefit is real.

The foundational component of the village-based savings and loan program is organizing community members into independent groups of 15 - 30 people for the purpose of saving money. The savings aren't big: many people are able to put aside $0.20 each week, if anything at all; others have saved as much as $6 after a good week at the market, but that's rare. One group, with 22 members, saved a little under $4 this week: on average, $0.17 each.

Each group's members collect the savings and store them in a wooden box. Keys for the box's two locks are kept with two trustworthy group members, ensuring that the box is opened only in front of the group.

Some people question the security of the box. Couldn't it be stolen and opened easily enough with an axe or a rock? The group takes certain precautions, such as selecting a group member to store the box who has a secure house (which means a front door that locks). The reality, though, is that assets are not secure in any place or any form in rural Africa. To underline that point, the leader of one of the groups we met with was absent: his goats had been stolen the night before, and he was off pursuing the thief.

We also asked about the necessity of the pooled savings concept. After all, couldn't each person keep their own savings in their own homes? Time and again, the women told us about the dangers of keeping money in their homes: before joining these groups, savings were always consumed by myriad little purchases at the market, or by neighbours who begged to borrow it, or by husbands who washed it down their throats at the local filling station. The box, they said, injected discipline into their savings that was difficult to achieve otherwise.

A second important element of the methodology is that group members can request loans from the accumulated capital, subject to approval from fellow group members. The terms are strict: often 30-day loans at 10% interest per month, but the group sets these terms themselves. Interest generated from loans is returned to the box as well, to be distributed to deposit-holders at the end of the year. Because the group sets its own rates, and because no money leaves the group (as it does for commercial and microcredit banks), group members reported being satisfied with this lending option.

"We like being able to borrow from the box," one woman explained to me. "We no longer have any external dependencies."

Better still, because the group is on the hook for the loan if it is unrecoverable, the group frequently comes together to help a neighbour with a struggling business in order to improve the likelihood that the borrower will not default. This is personal banking at its finest.

Each group exists for cycles of one year at a time. At the end of the year, outstanding loans are repaid and savings are returned to deposit-holders with any interest accumulated from loans taken out over the year. Each member keeps a record of her savings, so she can know precisely how much money she has stored in the box at any given time. Despite these records, the annual distribution always proves shocking. One woman knew that she would receive $40 at the end of last year, but was still in disbelief when distribution day came around. She had never held so much money at one time in her life. She described to us how she went home and carefully hid the money, and over the following days would open her hiding place, take out the $40 and just hold it in her hand and gaze at it before returning it to safety.

Members could put their accumulated savings back into the box at the beginning of the following cycle, but I didn't meet anyone who had ever done that. Everybody has a place to invest their annual nest egg: school tuition for their children, a clay oven to start a bakery business, a field to grow vegetables, a bicycle to improve access to markets, pigs for reproduction.

One man, who lived under a leaky thatched roof, vowed that if he could ever save enough money to buy tin sheets to improve his house, he would sleep the first night on top of the new roof as a sign of thankfulness. When we spoke with him, he had recently completed his dreamed-about home improvements, and was nursing a cold that he caught sleeping in the rain on top of his house.

Story after story, people told us how their lives have improved as a result of being in these groups. That several of the groups were on their fourth yearly cycle is a testament that they believe there is real value in belonging to the group. These well-established groups, who have been through several cycles of saving and investing, were most positive.

One young group explained to us that they had recently started after having seen the success of a neighbouring group. They had previously stayed on the sidelines as skeptics, until jealousy over the investments that the original group was able to make convinced them to form their own.

Of course, none of this means that the methodology is a panacea. Facilitating community members to mobilize into village-based savings and loan programs makes a valuable contribution towards fighting poverty, but is not a solution all by itself. It's not perfect, but we didn't meet anyone who wanted to quit their involvement in their groups, either.

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.