Day 5

We had a US AID photojournalist traveling with us yesterday afternoon and this morning to document the CNFA programs in Mozambique.   He is the one who took the not so attractive pic of me yesterday you can find on the dropshots site.  (www.dropshots.com/elizpou).    Let me know if you have any problems accessing it, because blogspot is not that great at allowing me to paste in photos.   

Here is one at the warehouse, showing women sewing sacks of corn and soybeans:

Here is a woman sifting dirt from soybeans:

I also liked this pic of the woman sorting handmade bricks.   Lots of small brick houses made with bricks out of the local red dirt plus water.   Apparently, if you heat the bricks, they will last 100 years (?).    Without that, which most people can’t afford, maybe 20 years.  I’ll try to get a couple of shots of a house being built near our meeting place.   

It was raining off and on today and of all days, there were no cars at the meeting place.   Andreano and I took taxi bikes to and from lunch and back to the guesthouse today.   Did I mention rain?   Muddy, rutted dirt roads with spots of standing water.   Of course, no helmets in sight.   A bit thrilling and otherwise noneventful.  Andreano took this:

Day 4

My normally quiet little guesthouse is reverberating with music from an apparently uncaring neighbor who likes to blast bad disco-type music - most annoying - and I can't call the police to report him.   Oh well.   I guess this will be one night I sleep with the windows closed and hope the fan dulls the sound enough to sleep.   

Have I mentioned food?   The guest house feeds me  breakfast, lunch and dinner and the meals are pretty tasty.  We usually start with soup.   Rice and beans are always there, along w/ tomatoes and lettuce from their garden (not really ripe yet, but ok), some kind of cooked greens (sort of a spinach collards combo), some kind of meat - tonite was fish, fresh rolls and fruit for dessert.   Lunch was stewed chicken and the above mentioned additions.    The last two days we've have really good papaya.   Tonite include pineapple.   Tangerines available all three meals today.   

A good, long work day today.   I stayed up late last night creating some financial templates we could use today.   Before the meeting started, we went to see a corn processing machine at work.   It didn't work.   Something was wrong with the electricity and the employee in charge couldn't make the machines start.   You could hear the machine getting a big jolt of juice, but the belt that should move two wheels just would not start.   One lesson learned is that given local infrastructure and available expertise, FM should not be counting on running their machine at full speed every single day.  

We worked on the start up costs all morning and again in the afternoon.   I had been told not to expect the farmers to want to stay past noon.   However, all 4 of these guys have committed to 6 days of full mornings and a shorter afternoon session.   I'll take pity on them and let them take Sunday off.   

This is an experiential type of training.   Essentially, I am explaining a little piece of the puzzle (elements of start up expenses) and then the farmers have to come up with the answers.   I stop them every now and again for a couple of teaching moments, explaining how the process they just experienced will help them when they write another business plan.   

I redid my proposed schedule and divided the days w/ farmers into two day sessions for each of three main areas: finance, marketing, operations.   Then I've left two days for myself to draft plan language and another day for revisions and discussions w/ one of the NGOs.   I leave this area of August 9, and fly back to Beria for a debrief with the agency which "hired" me.   Then August 10, I start the long miserable trek back home, arriving the evening of August 11, after over 30 hours of flying and waiting in airports.   

My dropshots site (www.dropshots.com/elizpou) has today's pics.   I just didn't want to fool with the frustration of trying to make blogger accept my photos.  

Now, early to bed tonite.   

Day 3

Today was the first day of meeting members of the sponsoring organizations.   It becomes quite complex.   My primary “client” is Fedamoza(FM), a farmers association for this area of the country with nearly 1000 members.   Some of the members are part of smaller associations which come under FM’s umbrella.   Promer is a Mozambique government sponsored organization that has funds to distribute and they are the ones who need a business plan in order to grant the funds.   They will grant up to 70% of start up costs and FM has to come up with the rest, much of which is likely to be in kind contributions (labor, materials, etc).   Then there is SNV, a Dutch NGO which is supposedly helping FM implement this project.   Whew.   Still not clear on where all the pieces fit.   SNV asked my organization CNFA (funded by USAID) to supply a volunteer to help with a business plan.   That’s me. 

I’m not even going to discuss the fact that on my first meeting w/ Antonio (country director of CNFA), he gave me a different scope of work from the one I was contracted to perform, different organizations and different location.   The desired outcomes of the two scopes have a couple of differences which I think I can work with.   

The morning began with a trip to the FM warehouse where the store corn they buy from their members and then sell to larger producers.   This is their warehouse. 

      note - having trouble with blogger entering my photos tonite - dont know why - go to dropshots.com/elizpou to see the pics from today.   

These women pack the corn into bags which are then loaded onto a big truck. 

These are some of the people we met with today.   Two of them are reps from FM.   When the others left to visit other projects (Promer officials were in the area to do monitoring reviews of several projects), I met in a thatched roof open area near the warehouse with members of FM and one SNV person.  Lots of questions asked.   Not a whole lot of answers available.   This project is going to be quite a challenge.  

The afternoon was free as SNV and Promer had other committments.   We met with them in the evening to try to gain a little more clarity about their expectations.   

Here is where I ate lunch, surprising tasty grilled chicken and fried potatoes.    

Below is my translator, Adriano who is with me at all times. 

These cute kids that were in front of the compound tonite, cutting up for the camera:

They like seeing their pictures as I took them. 

Somehow my camera has disappeared.   It was in a side pocket of one of my carry ons and probably slipped out during my array of plane entries and exits.  So pics are coming from the iphone.   

Right now, I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed about what I’m supposed to accomplish in the next few days with the level of unanswered questions.   We are pretty far away from a legitimate business plan.   Its after dinner now and I’m planning on spending the next couple of hours organizing the next few sessions, along with some basic financial templates FM can use to project income, expenses, start up costs, etc.   Not sure how to proceed.   I’m going to start backwards from traditional business planning and work on finance basics first.   The we can talk about marketing, distribution channels, organization capacity, etc.   

Tomorrow morning, we start by visiting one of these corn processing machines and follow by a long session with FM reps to start filling in the blanks of the charts I will be creating tonite.   Whew again.    

Mozambique

Days 1 and 2 in Mozambique

I took a mid morning flight from Johannesburg to Beria, one of the larger cities of Mozambique.   Like the capital, it sits on the Indian Ocean.  Antonio, the country director of the assigning agency,  was late picking me up so I had to borrow a cell phone from a taxi driver and call him.  Fortunately, I was supplied with lots of phone numbers before I left the states.   My iphone is basically useless except for sudoku.    We talked logistics and purpose, leaving me with lots of questions and grateful for the Peace Corps hammering into the new volunteers the importance of flexibility and dealing with uncertainty.   For example, the scope of work document I received before I left was the wrong one.   Antonio didnt think that location would be acceptable to a female volunteer (given the relative primitiveness of the site from which I write this, yikes) so changed it with the one I’m going to.   Fortunately the mission is somewhat similar.   A business plan still needs to be written for a farmer co-op.   He gave me a loaner cell phone with key phone numbers and a bunch of per diem cash.   I like the idea that with the per diem, I dont have to account for each penny I spend.   The hotel and transportation are paid, meals and incidentals covered by the per diem.  

Antonio dropped me off at my hotel, a homely but clean facility only a block from the ocean and across from a park, with air conditioning.  
Here is the hotel.   Notice the woman balancing a huge load of bread on her head.   There is a bakery next to the hotel and it was full of people gathering large amounts of bread (it looked like baguettes), presumably to sell.  

I ate a tasty fish kebob at this restaurant at the outdoor terrace with a view of the ocean.


Not much to do in the evening except read and sleep.   The promised internet at the hotel stayed broken throughout the evening and next morning, despite promises to the contrary.   The tv had 5 channels, only one of which had a clear picture and everything was in Portugese.   No problem.   The kindle had plenty of entertainment.

Antonio brought a usb modem this morning.   It seems to work fine.   At least I can get and answer emails.   We will see what happens when I try to post these pics to my blogsite.    Just in case, I’m putting all of the ones in the blog and a bunch of others in my dropshots site (dropshots.com/elizpou)

Lots of time waiting here.   A breakfast of cereal and juice at the hotel, followed by taxi to the Beria airport.   Not much going on there.   Yesterday, there were 6 people on my plane from Jo-burg and we were the only people at the airport.  Today, the little plane was full for the trip to Nampula, in the northern part of the country.   It was the only plane going anywhere today at that airport.   Ditto for the arrival in Nampula.   Just us.  Both airports are smaller than Asheville airport, a bit larger than Key West airport.  

Then came a 4 hour drive to Altomalaque, where I will stay the next 10 days.   The driver who met me at the airport did not speak English and we had to pick up my interpreter for the trip, a nice young man named Adriano who works for a local AIDS prevention organization.   This is his first interpreter job. 

Lots of dusty roads, small huts lining the roadway.   Just when it looked like we were going to make good time on a paved road, we would hit a detour onto dirt paths to route around a good bit of construction.   Looked like several bridges were being refurbished.   It probably added 50% to the time it took to get here.  
One group of huts after another, lots of people walking.   That’s a baby in the sling riding behind the woman in the picture.  While public transportation supposedly exists, it was not evident as we left the city.   It seems like most people were walking or riding bicycles.   Very few signs of market activity or stores where someone could buy something.  Miles of miles of this. I was glad I had the driver stop to pick up two liters of water, tho by the time this trip was over, I was sorry I drank so much of it.  

I asked Antonio about the large number of dirt structures that looked like upside down cones:
They are all over the place.   Turns out these are anthills!   Local lore is that if one gets built in your hut you have to move out and destroy the hut or someone will die.   I am pretty sure I would die if one of these appeared in my house.  

We finally arrived at my living quarters for the trip, a small compound built by the Catholic church.   There are two buildings circled by a wall.   One looks like a school building.   Mine is u-shaped around a courtyard.   The courtyard is a garden.   This pic is taken from the POV of my room, which faces onto the courtyard, a decent sized room with an ensuite bath and, thank heavens, a fully functioning flush toilet.   The shower has one of those big water tanks right over it and if it doesnt come crashing down on me,  I’m happy. 

As you might expect, multiple sockets are not in ready supply so I’m alternating the charging of my various devices, made somewhat easier as I’ve basically abandoned the ipad with no wireless available.   This place supposedly has wireless internet, but its broken, big surprise.   I’m glad I have the portable modem, which works fine, although slow. 

Somehow, my camera must have slipped out of the side of one of my carry ons so I’m left with the iphone’s camera.   So it will be good for something in addition to sudoku. 

Lots of confusion upon arrival tonite.   The facility person said they werent expecting us til tomorrow.   There are 3 agencies cross communicating here and its a bit of a challenge, but patience and flexibility pay off (thanks again, Peace Corps).   Adriano and I ate dinner at the compound with an Italian volunteer and three other people, including a man I think is the manager/caretaker.   Marco, the Italian, spoke a little English.   Everyone else speaks Portuguese.   Shades of Armenia.   One of the agency people showed up after dinner and we established a tentative game plan for tomorrow - the game plan is we will get together and make a game plan with another of the agencies and the President of the “host” organization (the one that wants help with the business plan).   This is all pretty vague for me right now and I’m just going to let the fullness of time reveal what needs to be revealed. 

Ok, now comes the challenge of getting this document into the blog.   If it doesn’t work, I’ll send it via a few emails.   Feel free to share w/ our friends.