New Faces, Same Places

These days I’ve spent most of my time in the office welcoming and orienting two new faces to the Sankhani Moyo team: our new CRWRC consultant for Mozambique (and thus my new supervisor), Istifanus Gimba, and our new local manager, Pastor Endane. With these changes I have consequently become the veteran leader of the project. While this has caused a significant deviation from my original service description, it has presented several mutual capacity-building opportunities, so in that sense the overarching objectives of my presence here are still being met. With my contract finishing in September, we are working hard to ensure that we capitalize on our time together to have a complete transfer of leadership and management to these two new gentlemen.

At the end of May I spent a week in Malawi attending a training seminar for a community development tool known as PRA (Participatory Rural Appraisal). I, along with forty other Malawian and Mozambican community development facilitators working for CRWRC partners, spent a week learning how to use this helpful tool to engage communities in a discussion about their past, present and future. When skillfully facilitated, PRA techniques can significantly boost community mobilization in development efforts, not only by recognizing their potential and current situation, but by recognizing their previous achievements. This tool integrates nicely with AI (Appreciative Inquiry) principles, which seek to initiate positive change by uncovering potential to promote instead of highlighting problems to fix. Amidst the many acronyms of development tools and organizations, PRA and AI can easily sink into the alphabet soup of the development enterprise. Yet the technical names and their theoretical underpinnings are lesser importance on the ground, where true change occurs—where development workers seek to transform these acronyms into meaningful processes for every villager willing to share his or her time, experiences and dreams. While participating in the practical simulation training done in rural Malawian communities, I came to appreciate not only the power of these tools, but also the skill needed by facilitators to use and adapt them in the delicate and complex process of community development.

a week in the bush

In early April I asked my colleagues if they had any family or friends somewhere in the bush—far off the grid and beaten path—where I could pass a week to better understand village life and improve my Chichewa. Within a week I was crossing a river with a backpack over my head looking for Senhor Nkhoma’s compound, where I would stay in one of his skillfully-constructed mud huts. It proved a wonderful week, full of learning and, in the absence of any light pollution whatsoever, a brilliant display of stars each night. A foreigner in these parts is quite rare, so it was a week full of interesting conversations, curious children, and warm hospitality. Perhaps most intriguing was a gift from the local chief: a specially-prepared meal of goat meat—not exactly my idea of an ideal meal in my mostly-veggie diet, but the gesture was of deep respect held for visitors. This meal is a great example of the depth of African hospitality that I’ve experience over and over on this continent, and that I strive to reciprocate though always fall short… after all, I don’t have any goats to offer my guests!

In the field...

The rains have reduced to an occasional downpour, making my life much less muddy than the past several months! The end of the rainy season makes transport and community gatherings much easier, and in the coming month of April we will certainly be spending a lot of time in the field. Beyond the usual monthly monitoring field visits, we will be conducting two baseline surveys (concerning sexual practices of youth and recently married couples) and also completing a participatory community capacity evaluation in all of the communities where CRWRC is supporting development programs in this region of Mozambique.

Language

Language acquisition has been a major learning objective for me thus far in my time in Mozambique. The first several months I dedicated to brushing up and “Mozambicifying” the undeniably Brazilian Portuguese I started off with 5 months ago. While I continue to daily refine Portuguese, which is the language we use in our office and project, I am now dedicating more time to Chichewa, the local dialect that is used in many of the villages and communities where we work. Speaking with people in the language with which they are most comfortable is not only a gesture of respect, but also enables me and others to communicate more effectively and thus facilitate the development work and projects in which we participate. Learning a language is certainly a process that requires a fair amount of patience and humility, and I have experienced plenty of help and grace from colleagues and strangers alike.

january

Being back to Ulongue after some travel during the holidays has been pleasant; familiar faces and places remind me that this is home now. We (the staff at Sankhanimoyo) are ready for the coming year, which promises to hold a variety of developments and changes in the work we do here in Mozambique. During the next few weeks we will be busy with campaigns in new communities promoting the peer-to-peer groups we will be starting in February. Perhaps most exciting will be a new theater module we hope to implement as part of these campaigns. We look forward to encouraging the creativity we have already seen in the youth here!

December Entry

Greetings from Vila Ulongwe, the small town in northwest Mozambique where I will be living and volunteering during my one-year internship with CRWRC.

I have joined a team of four Mozambicans who make up an organization known as Sankhanimoyo, meaning “Choose Life” in Chichewa, the local language. Together we are implementing a variety of projects related to HIV/AIDS prevention in the attempt to curtail the spread of HIV among youth and young adults in the region.

During my time here, I will be co-managing the projects with Rev. Venâncio Patreque, who has already dedicated several years to the program. As I settle in and work with him and the others involved in Sankhanimoyo’s outreach, I anticipate a steep learning curve in terms of culture, language, and the process of community development here in rural Mozambique. With the goal of mutual enrichment—the ideal backbone of any development agenda—I welcome the upcoming challenges and accomplishments.