On a Wednesday afternoon I met a group of women who live in a small village in the north of Mozambique. Most of them have worked on their land all day, and look tired. They are concerned about me catching a few rays of sunlight and urge me to move into the shadow. It am surprised to notice that some of them have small pearls of sweat popping up on their faces, while I actually do not feel that hot. While we sit down on a mat of woven leafs, I look at their headbands and skirts and I try to copy their body language.
We start to chat, they explain how they organized themselves in a group about five years ago. They had some education together, that is, until their teacher stopped visiting them. They started to farm, growing tomatoes and unions on a piece of land that was not used and they could borrow. It went well, and the land looked like a proper farm after a few years of hard work. Around that time, the owner of the land wanted to sell it. He did offer it to these ladies first, but they couldn’t afford to buy it. It was sold to someone else and the women were left with nothing.
Recently they got a break again: they applied for money to buy chicken and were granted with a start-up capital. After the farming failure, most of the ladies gave up on the idea of the women’s group. The new money was granted by white people which caused distrust in the community. The group that started off with 80 is now reduced to about 15 women.
A few of the ladies went out to buy 200 chicken. Upon return with the animals, they found out that while they had been out a part of the shed that they had made collapsed. Considering they had 200 chicken to keep an eye on, their first priority was to fix the shed. Due to this unexpected event, they had run out of money to buy feed for the chicken. So now they had 200 white chicken in a neat looking shed, but the animals hadn’t eaten in days.
When I asked them what they dream about, this is the story they shared with me. The concluding words were: “There is no point in dreaming. We dreamt a little, were aspirational, we tried something new. In the end, it got us nowhere.”
As we enter the shed, the chicken are taking a particular interest in my feet. So here I am, in a shed in rural Mozambique, wondering if it is normal chicken behavior to pick a white ladies’ feet, or if they are just so hungry that they hope my feet are actually their feed. And wondering what are we going to do about this situation…
On their request, me and my local guy came up with a range of ideas, varying from “use some money of the current harvest to invest in chicken feed” to “start to sell eggs down the road” to “kill a few chicken and prepare nice chicken meals that you sell at the mosque for an upcoming public holiday”. None of the ideas seemed to spark something, and my local guy estimated the chance that they were actually going to pursue any of them about 5%.
It’s quite a challenge not to get frustrated when listening to these stories. On the one hand, this is exactly why I like to work in this area: there is a lot of improvement potential, and small changes can have a huge impact. On the other hand, I realize that this is a target group that is difficult to reach, and the thought alone of working with a group with their attitude makes me feel tired.
“Entitlement mentality” annoys me. I understand that these ladies ask us for money to solve their problems. There are 290 NGOs in Mozambique, and there is little private sector activity. Inhabitants of the rural areas are used to receiving something when they meet a foreigner. And as I learned in Kenya last summer: “You can’t blame us for trying…”. At the same time, I would like to see people taking ownership of their own problems. To make it their challenge to find a solution, to involve others in their search for a solution, but not to expect strangers to come in and pick up the pieces after something has gone wrong. Very Dutch of me, you might say. I know.
I do think one will find people who simply will not get anything done – either because they are lazy, have a negative attitude towards life, because they have no goal whatsoever, or just because they can’t be bothered – anywhere around the world. I also believe that you can find go-getters, people who have ideas, who know what they want, who will fight for what they believe in who will be very successful at it at some point, at any place in the world you can imagine. These are the people that I am looking for to work with in and beyond Mozambique.
In order to do this work, you have to believe in it a little. You have to have a dream. A few days later I was so glad, to meet a smart student buzzing with energy, good ideas, and a can-do mentality. Can you imagine how his t-shirt made me smile? Encounters like this make sure that I remember my dream, and they keep me going, while having a lot of fun. It won’t be easy, but we’ll get there.
