Four years before, when we had first visited Mossuril, she had begun to make friends with the village children. But the difference between twelve and sixteen is huge. All her points of reference were different, the ideas, books, music and things she liked that were the mainstay of her social life in Holland, England and Italy came from another world. So she spent a lot of time reading and writing, and a lot of time composing songs. Interlaced with every day, somewhere in the college, Lolly can be heard singing. At New Year 2005, she went back to Amsterdam, Paris and Italy for two months to spend time with her big sister, in Umbria (where her father lives, and where she was born and grew up) and with Mees. It was only after she returned in the spring that she managed to find a balance between the world she had left and the African world she had come to. When she moves on to complete her formal education, she will have left an indelible mark on the students she has helped here, and she will also have some valuable things to take with her. Her vision of life has changed. Her horizons have broadened and burst that egocentric adolescent bubble so beloved of teenage girls. She speaks fluent Portuguese, she is writing a novel and has enough material to fill another three, and whatever hardships she may encounter in the future, she has a scale to measure them on. Rather in the way I was rudely awoken by my sojourn in Venezuela at the age of eighteen, at sixteen, Lolly has woken up.
Not least, the chance to go to school, which she spurned in Europe, is every child’s goal here. Their hopeless dream was her right. What she once turned her back on, she now wants to embrace. And money, which she once spent like water on designer knick-knacks, has gained a value here. Her weekly pocket money was more than a local family’s monthly budget. And things she used to throw away would be their most coveted and prized possessions. Whatever she goes on to do with her life, she will do with conscious appreciation for its many gifts. No one who has lived in the bush takes things for granted again: even little things like turning on a tap or switching on a light remain miraculous. Our time here, being often thrown back on to our mutual company for want of any other, has given us a unique and intense year together. But more importantly for a teenage girl, Mozambique has wrapped itself round her heart. It was here that she became a woman because it was here that she fell in love. An unlikely and chance encounter in Chocas-Mar resulted in a tumultuous and passionate relationship that has taken her across the length and breadth of northern Mozambique in its wake.
Bob Dylan wrote a song called ‘Mozambique’. It was actually about a town in America, but it could have been written for me. It is more like an obsession set to rhythm than a song. I moved here with an obsession wrapped in a drum beat and then the place and its rhythms swallowed me. Whatever I write about it, the place, the people and their history are inextricably bound up. And my own personal life and that of thousands of Macua villagers have become linked. It is my story and their story. It shows and tells the transformation I am undergoing and it does the same for a swathe of virgin coast and the lush bush lands behind it. And it shows how Morripa, the mestres and a handful of their peers are turning the tide in this African village behind God’s back.
XII
The College
WHEN THE COLLEGE OF TOURISM opened to fanfares of pipes and drums and ecstatic troupes of Tufu dancers, delegations from Maputo, 2,000 kilometres away, and Nampula, our provincial capital, 230 kilometres away, arrived and walked through an avenue of flags up the main steps and onto the portico. Over a thousand villagers came to watch, together with hundreds of schoolchildren. The international volunteers were there, Morripa and all the workers were there, Mees and I were there, Sieka and Pipi the project leaders-to-be were there, the regulos and traditional leaders were there dressed in their official regalia, two dozen local and provincial dignitaries were there, the Minister of Tourism was there, the national radio, TV and press were there, and tucked almost out of sight in all the photos are Ellie and Ramon.
In the first six months, it was Ellie and Ramon and Morripa who held the college together. Ellie Greenwood is my niece. Born in Arequipa in Peru, she was adopted as a tiny baby and brought back to England where she grew up in the quaint Devon village of Chagford. As a teenager, she moved to London and began to work with a youth project affiliated to the Home Office. It emerged that she had a future in Human Resources and her career was one of rapid promotion. I saw a lot of Ellie when she was a very little girl and then I hardly saw her again for more than an hour here and there in London and Devon. I remembered one of the few proper conversations we had, when she was about fourteen, in which she said it was her dream to work in charity.
By chance, just after Teran Foundation started, I met Ellie again. She asked me a lot about Mozambique and the college-to-be and told me that she would like to go out and work there. I explained that it was pioneer stuff and not for the faint-hearted: we were planning to do something new. I didn’t think it had ever been done before so we didn’t really know what to expect. There was Morripa who was the key to everything and everybody out there, but then there were some huge gaps and imponderables. Ellie was adamant: she wanted to go, and she asked me to give her good warning when it would start.
Fourteen staff members and volunteers foregathered in Johannesburg in early September 2004 to travel in a group for the razzmatazz opening. Ellie and her boyfriend, Ramon Reeves-Whit, were planning to join them via Zimbabwe (where Ramon has family). Ellie emailed to say they would make their own way directly to the college. The first group arrived but there were still no signs of Ellie. Her ‘directly’ was wishful thinking; she and Ramon travelled overland and by boat and raft on an African odyssey, the arduousness of which must have prepared them in some ways for the inevitable culture shock which knocked out so many members of the first team of helpers within the first few days of arrival.
As the workers were struggling to get the building ready for the grand reception on 27 September, the staff-to-be invaded Morripa’s compound and camped there out of the path of falling tiles and cement dust.
I arrived three days after the volunteer group and their leaders, Pipi and Sieka. I couldn’t stay for long, I had been juggling work to come out beforehand but there were problems in the Dutch fiction factory and it was becoming clear that if I turned my back on my office for more than a few days someone would stick a knife in it. I arrived at night with a carload of fresh fruit and vegetables, crates of bottled water and sacks of food, bags of ribbons and balloons and boxes of delicacies for the coming feast.
Arrival in Cabaceira Grande or Pequena is always via a stop at Morripa’s compound. Communications are a constant challenge in Mossuril District and the usual mainstay of the M-cell mobile phone network had been playing up for days. When this happens, a cloying female voice informs you that the network is down and asks you to please try again later. The message is in Portuguese and the last words are ‘Liga mais tarde’ delivered in a jolly sing-song. They are the most annoying words in the world.
Lolly, Tigo and Victoria Salmon (who came out for a beneficiary script-writing course) formed a group called Random Drop and wrote their first song about it, using the ‘Liga mais tarde’ as the chorus. Random drop is a particularly African phenomenon and it is the arbitrary and random cutting off of telecommunications be they phone, fax and internet. It occurs mid-sentence, mid-email, and mid-fax. Its cause is mysterious: no one can explain it, and it is very irritating. On the rare occasions when internet is available on Ilha or in Nampula, entire documents disappear into cyberspace without so much as a by-your-leave or a nano-second of warning.
In Europe we have road rage; in Africa there is internet rage. A newcomer succumbing to apoplectic fury is quite a normal sight in any of the four internet-access places open to a public of up to a million potential clients. On Ilha, where there are only three computers, only two of which work, the fits of frustration tend to turn into general discussions. It takes an average of ten minutes to open each email and an average of ten minutes to send one. Only people who have been here u
nderstand that with the best will in the world it is not possible to work and keep up a regular digital correspondence.
For over a year, there was no postal service available to the college. The District Administrator informed me that no post had ever been delivered. There was no post office at all and no one in his area had ever received a letter. We compromised and gave his office as our c/o address and asked as many people to write as possible. The central post office had confirmed that there was no postal service to anywhere in Mossuril, but they added that it was because none had ever been needed. A post mistress told me, ‘If you get enough letters to justify a delivery, when the sorting office has a sackful, then someone will travel to Mossuril and deliver them.’
We obviously didn’t reach our quota because the delivery never happened. However, one volunteer, Mauro from Italy, received a letter, a postcard and also a package of edible goodies from home. These were delivered to the District Administrator and duly forwarded to Mauro. I can only deduce that someone in the sorting office had a soft spot for Italians and a friend or cousin travelling our way who acted as courier.
Since then, we have had a postal revolution. The college now has a post box on Ilha. Our address is:
Caixa Postal 81, Ilha de Moçambique
Provincia de Nampula, Mozambique
The amazing thing is that letters get through. Letters arrive. Parcels arrive. Books arrive. Mosquito nets arrive. The difference is fantastic. Sailing to Ilha and receiving a new book to read is the most enormous treat; as is being able to take back a book in Portuguese (for those students and workers – like Marufo and Morripa – who read but are starving for books). As with so many things, the postal box option was there from the start but its existence seemed to be yet another piece of classified information issued on a ‘need to know’ basis and none of us knew it was there.
While skills and information are transferred to key local people so that they can eventually take over most of the management, we depend quite heavily on volunteers. Some of these volunteers need to be specialists, such as agronomists, chefs and waiters, barmen and housekeepers, stock-keepers, and gardeners, English-to-foreigners teachers, and health and hygiene workers, but we also need a lot of willing hands. There is useful work for dozens of willing hands here, whether they come for a month, three months, or longer. The more help we have, the more we can do. The college runs on a relative shoestring and it will keep running, with or without me. It has a market garden to help support it. And thanks to the Dutch charity Moments of Joy, which gives just that, we have a restaurant kitchen and storeroom and a community restaurant. The opening day of this restaurant has kept sliding forwards, but it had a trial opening in July 2006 and it will be officially opened when Maurice Eykman, whose charity paid for most of it, will come and see the moments of joy she has given the village. We hope that in years to come it can pay its own way. That would ensure that 2 Coqueiros is here to stay. But even though it is still in its infancy, the local people are so fond and proud of it that I think between them they would find a way to keep it running no matter what.
Students Mugiva and Sergio and their two teams of waiters (of whom there are ten men and women divided into two shifts) received a baptism of fire when it opened. Most of the waiters had never seen a restaurant or bar before and really had no idea how it would work. To get them started, Jason, Lolly’s boyfriend, came from Nampula to head both teams. He has experience in the business, knows the area well, is bilingual in English and Portuguese and cares enough about the local people to first carry and then guide them through this new world. Since we now live at the mercy of tyrannical generators, Jason’s skill in repairing engines has been invaluable. We may be on our fifth generator, but without all the repair work that he and also Tigo have put in round the clock, we would probably be in the high twenties. From the minute he stepped in, he became a key member of the team.
The training restaurant didn’t open its doors because it doesn’t have any. It is open plan, so that customers can sit in the breeze and eat and drink surrounded by nature. Due to a slight hitch in the building schedule (caused by the usual problem of materials not arriving when they should), there was no time to do restaurant trials in situ before opening to the public. The twenty-fifth of June is a national holiday, the day when the whole of Mozambique commemorates its hard-won independence from Portuguese rule. The workers and students were determined to open 2 Coqueiros on Independence Day. The training bar and restaurant sit in a palm grove surrounded by dozens, rather than two, coconut palms (coqueiros). But built into its structure and protruding from its roof are two tall palm trees.
When Independence Day dawned, despite months of lessons to prepare student waiters for just such a day, everyone froze as the first cars arrived. Tigo (who had helped teach the students for the previous twelve months and is the teacher closest to them) was bedridden with a massively infected cut. As our resident (and only) electrician, notwithstanding the pain he was in, he valiantly offered to be carried into the new restaurant before breakfast to direct the wiring of it, being lifted up and down by the students to do the intricate bits himself. When everything was ready, a surge of guests arrived and cookery and restaurant students alike froze. On that first day, for the first several hours, Lolly was run off her feet being head waitress to show the others how it should be done. Jason ran the bar, and I ran the kitchen. Halfway through that first day, the students began to get the hang of it.
On day two, when Ancha got a four-dollar tip from a tourist impressed by her grasp of English, word flew round the village. It would take ten mornings of carrying sacks of salt in the salt flats to earn four dollars. Jason and Lolly continued to struggle from dawn till dusk and were rewarded when Mugiva, one of the newest and quietest students, got the hang of how to run the bar. Mees, having designed the restaurant and ferried much of its equipment over from Amsterdam, completely missed the opening by being (like Tigo) bedridden with an infected wound and an alarmingly high fever. I ferried news of how the restaurant launch was going back to his sickbed, but he was too ill to be able to savour either the news or the offerings of miraculously upgraded drinks and snacks.
Notwithstanding some breakages, loss of drinks, an entire 10-kilogram marlin, a client being served a glass of rice pudding instead of a drink of Amarula, and another client getting a side order of chocolate mousse with his chicken saffron, some tears, and some frayed tempers, the restaurant was a success. In fact, it is an ongoing success, climbing from strength to strength and even luring some curious tourists to Cabaceiras’s shores. And within two weeks of opening the training restaurant, twenty-one new students enrolled for Teacher Tauacal’s orientation class, swelling our numbers to seventy-four students.
With fourteen people in the kitchen and ten in the restaurant, 2 Coqueiros tends to dominate the college. As dominatrixes go, a provider of cold drinks, ice, good, mostly African food, a selection of African music, a pretty garden and pleasant company is not a bad one to serve. I never thought I would be a restaurateur ferrying crates of 2M and Coca-Cola back and forth or stock-taking liquor or menu planning, but it is not so different from running a very large villa full of house guests as I did for nineteen years in Italy. The most significant difference is that all the guests have to pay in a restaurant; and in this case, all the money goes to help the village.
We do not aspire to great profits, which is just as well, because even if the restaurant were full six days a week we couldn’t make them with our low prices. It will be enough in the future to do a little more than break even. Local people cannot afford the tourist prices of Mozambique and we want local customers. The more clients we have, the more training the students can get serving them, so we have priced everything very low and some things at silly prices so that the village can have a focal point and anyone with a job or grant can afford to drop in for a tea or coffee or a cold drink.
Vakháni vakháni seems to be our motto as we take two steps forward and one step back. Despi
te having had a few ups and downs with missing stock, Mugiva and Sergio now run the bar and the drink storerooms on their own. And with two students expelled for petty theft, the bar is working and making enough money to keep going. The real thief, as Morripa calls it, is the generator, which consumes petrol like an alcoholic on a constant binge. Not only does it knock back over five hundred US dollars per month, but our generators also keep burning out and breaking down, and, on one memorable day, imploding. Everyone here has become generator-sensitive, asking after its health as though it were a sick child. If the lights flicker, everyone braces for imminent disaster.
No matter how many ups and downs there have been, and no matter how many wrecked appliances are piled up in our storeroom, we now have some visible and lasting results. Two years into the project we cannot just say that it is working: we can prove it. Out of all the things I have embarked on and failed in over the past thirty-five years, I thank the stars that this is not one of them. There are seven thousand people needing it to work, seven thousand people praying to the gods, to Allah and to their ancestors that it will work.
Over the past three decades, I have spent enormous amounts of time and energy (and a couple of small fortunes to boot) restoring castles, villas and palaces as a sort of hobby. As hobbies go, my penchant for collecting and restoring beautiful ruins was a lot more cumbersome than, say, stamp-collecting or bird-watching. Mossuril District indulges this hobby to the hilt. Cabaceira Grande is littered with ruined palaces, as is Mossuril town and its environs. Beyond the college, between the mud huts and arid strips of manioc, the incongruous remains of grandiose buildings are the nesting grounds of genets and iguanas, owls and crows. They are built so solidly that only their outer walls collapse. Built out of coral rock in monumental Mediterranean style, they have porches and balconies, massive doorways and chipped, red-tiled roofs. Peeling lime stucco in a palette of pastels pokes out through palms and strangling ficus trees. Beautiful as many of these ruins are, there is no money to restore them, so they tumble down a little more each year as squirrels dislodge the tiles and the rains take their toll.
Mozambique Mysteries Page 13