Yesterday, we went to South Africa to get our special 6 month visas, finally. Visas cause a lot of stress! We had to go to the Mozambican embassy in Nelspruit, which is the city closest to the Mozambican border, it is a whole different world over there. They have malls, grocery stores, and even McDonalds! We took advantage and got ourselves a big mac. We did a little shopping in the nice malls, took our time around the clean city. We left Nelspruit at the end of the day relieved- with our 6 month visas in hand. We cruised to the border only to find out they made a mistake with our visas. The validity dates say 13/6/11-13/12/11, which is correct. Then it says valid for only 30 DAYS. Ahhh... So frustrating. Looks like we have to take ANOTHER trip to South Africa to figure out our visas AGAIN. At least there is some good shopping in Nelspruit, right?
I got a kick out of this today. So today were driving in Maputo, when a police man comes out in the middle of the road with his hand up waving us to the side of the road. Great. So we pull over, roll down the window, and up comes the police man. He asks for the drivers license in a stern voice, so we hand it over. We have this down, they aren't as tough as they seem. We know the routine. He glances at the drivers license in silence for 20 seconds or so, then asks Alex to step out of the car. This was not part of the routine. So I stay in the car and watch him as they walk away and start talking a little ways away from the car. I couldn't hear what was being said. It was 3 cops with AK-47s hoisted on their backs vs. Alex. I see the policia point on the road, and I see them discussing. After a few minutes of them talking, I look over and I see Alex getting the cops phone number. They were laughing, slapping hands, it looked like they were best friends. Then Alex gets back into the car.
"What happened?" I asked
"Were friends, he forgave me." He said
Apparently Alex made an illegal U-turn. Alex always has a way to get out of a ticket. Were 0/13 in traffic fines. Hopefully I don't jinx it.
They are pretty common here. Mozambique has the highest percentage of albinos in the world. I see at least one albino per day, which i am pretty surprised with.
Why they are so much common here than any where else?
It is very interesting to me.
I've learned a couple interesting things about albinos. Here is one, 96% of albinos have eye problems. Ujembe (pictured below) has an eye problem called Nystagmus. His eyes are constantly moving involuntarily. Poor guy. Another interesting thing I've learned is that there are some crazy beliefs about albinos in Africa. A lot of them are killed by the people so the "witch doctors" can use their body parts for potions and/or remedies. Read this article.
Alex(on his mission) with a former missionary Elder Ujembe(albino)
Trinita and Zuculi at their monthly meeting where all see
the money change hands and together they do simple math
The Debits and Credits
Their Journal Entries
We've been supervising a small Agrifinance Loan program that has a portfolio of a little over $1000 and has done much good:
2 and a half months ago two 18,000 Meticais ($600 USD) loans were given to two women to establish a small chicken raising project in which each woman was to raise 200 chicks each, and then after raising the chicks to chickens in her home, would sell them on the local streets. One woman, Trinita, already knew how to raise chickens to sell, and the collateral for her loan was to teach another woman, Lurdes to do the same.
They are now raising their third flock, and have each paid back 5,400 Meticais ($180 USD,17.6% of their loan) in just two months time. (they chose to expedite paying it back, that is why they are paying it back so high).
They have made an average of 2,337 Meticais monthly monthly, ($80 USD, just above the countries minimum wage of $73/month.) Since the start of the project. This number will nearly double when Trinita and Lurdes do not have to make the loan payment.
In 5 months time the loan of 18,000 Meticais will be paid off, and these two women will be making 2.3 times the minimum wage of $73/month. Then Lurdes will have to pay her "interest rate" and teach another woman her newly found trade, and this new woman's business will be financed by the $180 that Lurdes and Trinita have paid back and the $820 outstanding.
Good Business is what will bring these people out of poverty, I am convinced.
Last week we spent the whole week looking for the land for a humanitarian corn project. The man that is funding the project is a very good business man, but he is a humanitarian at heart. He is willing to spend a lot of money on the project (by a lot I mean millions) and all the profits will go back to the communities. We will use the money to renovate their churches, schools, houses, etc. The corn will also be providing food security to the people in the communities. Which is well needed in Mozambique.
We drove around for hours looking for the right land to use. We had a map from the government officials to follow, but it was not a well written map. The people who wrote the map could hardly read the map themselves. I think everyone was confused at one point or another. It was frustrating at times, but we found the right piece of land, finally. There is so much land up for grabs in these areas of Mozambique, they are begging for people to invest in the land.
Looking at the map
Looking for the right land
The area on the map where the land is.
No he's not flipping you off.
It is going to be a very long and frustrating process to get this project started. We are going to have to work with government officials and tribal people to get the land. We have to do soil samples. We have to get contracts, licenses, permits, etc. We have to hire people to manage the land. We have to hire the right people to clear out the irrigation systems that are already established from 40 years earlier, plus build new irrigation systems. We have to have regular farm workers. Theres a lot to do. I don't even know all the steps, we've never started a farm in Africa, but we will find out the steps soon. I never thought we would become farmers. I went to school to be a nurse, not a farmer! I'm excited to learn though.
The land that we are planning to use is about 1,000 hectares, (1 hectare is 10,0000 square meters) We will plant only 250 hectares to start out with as a trial. If the first cycle of crops shows to be successful, we will plant the remaining of the hectares. Eventually we are looking to invest in more land to plant 5,000 hectares. That, my friend, is a lot of corn.
Who better to get the process started than the one and only Alex Spencer? No one is better. He is the only person for the job. The investor asked him (and me since were connected) to stay until the corn project is up, running and stable. So when are we going to come back to Utah? Who knows? We don't even know. I guess we'll see. It'll be an adventure.
Some village people walking after collecting wood.
The canal for the land is on the left.
Some local boys. They don't speak Portugues. Hard to communicate.
Some one gave them Big Red gum, you should have seen their faces, they were not expecting it to burn their mouths!
The sky was so big this day. It was amazingly beautiful.
We had the opportunity to travel near the South African border to the 4th of October school. (They name everything after dates here.) The school is secondary education for boys and girls with grades 8-12. The school has around 500 students attending, with classes running from 8 am to 9 pm. The students in the particular school (different from other schools in Maputo) are good students from what we can tell. They really care about learning, and the teachers are able to control the classes of teenagers.
The organization that we are working for has raised funds for to support 24 girls who attend the 4th of October school in Mozambique from 8th grade all the way until graduation of 12th grade. The girls are hand selected so they can support the girls who really need help. They supply new uniforms, books, tuition, and other extra things that are needed. It is really a great program they have set up for these girls.
The main reason for our visit was to set up a session of skype with a kindergarten class in Missouri who set up lemonade stands in their town to raise funds to donate to these girls in Mozambique so they can attend school. The skype session was so sweet. The mozambican girls were amazed with the technology. They prepared a song to sing as group to the girls, and it was beautiful. A few tears were shed during the song, it was so sweet. A few of the girls in the school were able to speak a little english to them, so questions were going back and forth. The answers to the questions were very different. Here are some examples:
Mozambican girls: "Oh, we don't know how to swim, and we don't have horses. We like to walk around with our friends"
Question 3: "What is your favorite thing to study in school?"
American girls: "RECESS!"
Mozambican girls: " Portugues, math, geography"
It was interesting to see the differences, its a whole different world from America.
After the skype session was over they had each written a thank you note to their sponsors, and they each read them out loud for us to hear. We handed out their uniforms for school. We also handed out new backpacks, shoes, and outfits as gifts to the girls in celebration of Children´s Day. They were all so excited and thankful. They all hurried to the bathroom to try on their outfits to show us. It was so fun to be able to see how grateful they are for the things that are given to them, even though it is not much.
As we were about to leave, the director sat us down and talked to us about a girl who is about to graduate from 12th grade who is brilliant. She is at the top of her class. The director has been supporting her financially to be able to attend school for the last year or so because the girl has a terrible situation. Both of her parents have recently died from AIDS. She lives with her stepdad who does not treat her well. She has big dreams of attending college and becoming a medical doctor. The director assured us she is capable. College in Mozambique costs about $1,200 per year. We were able to set her up with a scholarship to attend college. Isn`t it awesome that people in the world are willing to give up their own money to support people around the world who are in need? I love it, and I get to see the results first hand while I´m here and it is a great site to see.
No Poor Among Us is hoping to support 26 more girls next year in the school to make it 50 girls who are being supported. These girls need it, they are all in terrible situations, and it is really helping them and changing their lives. It is a HUGE deal if someone graduates from the 12th grade here. The people who get jobs in Mozambique are the people who make it to the 12th grade. They will have many opportunities in life because of this.
Everything is progressing here, its a good feeling. If you would like to help sponsor a girl to attend school, please contact us at alexanderhspencer@gmail.com
Here are some pictures and videos from our visit:
All the girls in their new outfits, aren't they so beautiful?
Profit motive must be present to create a sustainable support model to help those in need.
Agriculture is the answer to this need. The people of Mozambique need honest work with profit motive, food security, and economic growth. time and again, the answer is agriculture.
Last September all of Maputo, Mozambique shut down for 5 days. I was locked in an apartment building at the time. Food prices were too high and the population had enough of it and rioted. Mozambique is a net importer of food, not long ago they were a net exporter.
As farming has improved, so have incomes, health, and economies.
During the green revolution, which took place from the 1960s to the 1980s, improvements in staple crops including maize, wheat, and rice helped double the amount of food produced, save hundreds of millions of lives, and drive broader development throughout much of Asia and latin America.
Unfortunately, the benefits of the green revolution did not extend to Sub-Saharan Africa. over the past 25 years, as the rest of the world has doubled, tripled, and even quadrupled productivity, agricultural productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa has stagnated.
This stagnation has come at a tremendous cost. in the 1960s, Africa was a net exporter of food. today, it’s a net importer, and one in three people in Sub-Saharan Africa lives in chronic hunger.
We took a trip up North again. We are getting ready for an investor to come here, so we had to make sure things were in line with the land that could possibly be invested in for corn production. This investor is coming looking to spend millions of dollars to start a corn project in Chokwe to help lower the prices of corn for the people and the local poultry industry. There is a Mozambican here named John who was in charge of the preparation and searching of land in Chokwe. John has known about the investor coming all the way from the U.S. to see the land for about 6 months now. The purpose of our first trip up to Chokwe earlier this week was to see the work John had done to get ready to show the investor the land. So we are driving along through some farmland, then all of a sudden John says, "This is the land that could be used". We continue to drive for 5 minutes or so and John says, "Ok, thats probably about where the land would end." And that is pretty much all he had prepared. No soil samples, no estimation of how much it would cost to irrigate the land, no real plan on how to acquire the land and get this.. he didn't even know how many hectors or acres the land was. Alex had to hold John's hand and give him a pep talk to do his best to prepare the information he could (which should have taken months) within two days. We had to make a seperate trip all the way to Chokwe to talk with " Vossa Excelencia Senhor Enginheiro Alberto" (Your Excellency Lord Engineer Alberto, that was literally his title that we had to call him) to assure him that we really were white people who wanted to use their land to benefit the locals. Alberto is in charge of the land in the District of Chokwe. When we finally got to Chokwe and caught him at a bad time- the wedding of which he was the "padrinho" (godfather). He took a moment to talk with us and after a five minute conversation, it was determined that if we would pay for his lunch and dinner he would work non stop the next day (his day off, a Sunday) to get two property proposals ready. If you buy a government official a nice lunch you get what you want! Many South Africans who do business here buy a full grown goat for about $15.00 and will randomly show up at a key government official or police officers house (or the witch doctor's) and offer the goat to the influential person as a sort of form of insurance.
We learned our lesson the first time with our trip up North. Last time we got stuck staying in a hotel that was a little sketchy. Granted we are in Mozambique, but I was a little scared to go to sleep that night. When we got to the hotel I was about to pee my pants from the long car ride and my reluctancy to use the facilities in public restrooms in Mozambique, so I ran in to use to bathroom only to find no toilet paper. We had to run to the front desk to ask for toilet paper. She looked at us as if she was annoyed and took 10 minutes (while I am hurting from how full my bladder is) to walk out to some warehouse to bring me one roll of the thinnest TP I've ever seen. I didn't bother to take a shower, since there was just a dirty, moldy tub with a cup on the edge to use. Our light source was a single light bulb coming out of wire on the ceiling. But that's not was the worse thing, I was afraid because our door basically didn't have a lock, while we are in the middle of the ghetto of Chokwe.
So, this time we decided to stay somewhere a little nicer. We actually stayed in a private hut on the beach. They were really cool. They looked a little sketchy on the outside, but once you walked in there was a nice comfy bed, electricity, a running toilet WITH toilet paper, and a hot shower. It was really nice. They made it so wind could flow through the hut, so you can hear the ocean as you are falling asleep. Only one downside- we had a pet mouse in our hut somewhere, but at least it didn't get us while we were asleep.
We even went out to see the sea turtles swimming. It was hard to get pictures of them since they were in the water and we would see them for a second or two at a time. They are so cool to see though! It was a fun trip across in the little boat with the locals. They were awesome, and the beach is BEAUTIFUL! Bilene is a little resort town, many people build large houses on the beach as their "getaway" home.
We had alot of progress with our trip. We will post more about the details on that later.
The gas tank on the boat
We asked him to carry us to the boat because we didn't want to get wet, and he did it! That kid was awesome!
