Mozambique

To Go Fast, Go Alone. To Go Far, Go Together.

Just off a gracious, tree-lined avenue named for the People’s Front for the Liberation of Mozambique – the Avenida das FPLM – lies an informal settlement. Obscured by a mango orchard, this crowded, yet invisible, community is central to ChildFund’s work in Maputo.

Beyond the mango trees, preschoolers take turns sliding down an open sewer’s steep sides into waste water. A gap in the cement-block wall adjacent to their makeshift playground allows us to enter the settlement. Our feet slide along a trail of sand strewn with broken glass. The path is barely wide enough for two to walk abreast.

This neighborhood has no street names, no house numbers. Its landmarks are tables covered with trinkets, or bright red piri-piri peppers piled behind window grilles. A splash of blue paint above an iron gate hints of business ventures: venda de peixe for the fisherman or, marking a vegetable shop, venda de verduras. Shoppers are conspicuously absent.

Every few feet the wall bordering this bairro turns abruptly, forcing us around corner after corner. Then, suddenly, the maze gives way to reed fences. People materialize. Families sit atop empty rice sacks and oil containers in front of one-room shanties. Teens cluster in sandy courtyards too narrow to support a cashew tree or cassava patch. In these reed and thatch homes, every child is deprived.

Squatter families build temporary shelters to match their tenuous existence. Years ago, they sold their ancestral homes and agricultural land in distant villages in hopes of a better life in Maputo. Few found steady employment here and their young men left home once again to work South Africa’s mines, only to return infected with HIV. Most have since died; their wives, if still alive, are now desperately ill.

Grandmothers, aunts or distant relatives care for these children, many of whom are undocumented and ineligible for government services like education and medical care. Even with birth certificates in hand, their caregivers cannot afford school fees or medication. The children who survive grow up illiterate, unemployable, idle. The adults expect betrayal.

“Last year,” the women say when we offer to enroll the children, “a different group came here promising to sponsor our orphans. They took our identification and disappeared.”

We listen and describe our collaboration with USAID and funding from the American Embassy. In the end, the women agree.

We move from shack to shack, enrolling children. Rather than rely on a community leader’s assessment of families in greatest need, we verify living conditions. By entering these elderly women’s homes, we allay their suspicions: we found our way through this labyrinth to enroll children and we will return next month to deliver their sponsor’s letters, and again, to monitor health and education.

Later we meet with another group of grandmothers, explaining our program model through a familiar metaphor – the three-stone fire. African women cook meals in a kettle resting on three large stones interspersed with sticks of burning wood. ChildFund’s sponsors are the first stone, we say, and the local organization implementing our programs is the second. But without the participation of the third stone – these sober-faced grandmothers sitting on the ground in front of us – we cannot address the community’s greatest needs. Suddenly they rise in ululation and dancing. We will go far together.

We set off before sunrise, driving along Indian Ocean coast. Crossing the Limpopo River, we pass the deep-sea diving resort at Xai-Xai and enter rural Inhambane province to meet up with ChildFund staff in Zavala at noon. In stark contrast with Maputo, enrollment there unfolds tranquilly. Village children dressed in their finest, and with hair carefully plaited, gather in a spacious, airy meeting room reserved for the event. Women chat, nurse babies, adjust skirts or wipe small faces as they await their turn with the photographer.

Over the past 7 years the mothers of Zavala witnessed sponsorship’s effect on their community – new primary schools, health centers with maternity wards, water catchment systems, latrines, livestock cooperatives and village savings and loans.

Many watched as their neighbors used the monetary gifts sponsors sent at holidays to build permanent homes and invest in new crops. These women need no convincing.

Despite appearances, Zavala’s children are also deprived. Floods, droughts and cyclones create annual cycles of food insecurity here. Zavala’s pristine location on the Indian Ocean makes fresh water a primary concern. Children residing in rural areas of Mozambique are even more likely to be excluded from the education system than their urban counterparts. And AIDS threatens them, as well. Their freshly paved road extends beyond Maputo down to South Africa’s mines.

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