While thousands of children in Mossuril have no school buildings, dozens of stately ruins stand abandoned to the elements. Back in 2003, when the derelict palaceu was donated to the community-college scheme, I started on a restoration binge which looks set to continue for many years to come. Talks with Morripa and the community leaders revealed that local builders and workers could restore the palace and that local villagers would be keen to enrol in the college-to-be. But as well as the palaceu, several other historic ruins were also available for eventual restoration, to house a primary and secondary school. Of these, the most magnificent (but alas, also the most expensive to repair) is the Governor General’s former summer palace. Thankfully, the Dutch national post-code lottery has pledged to restore this silent mansion and to equip it as a secondary school. This project is very dear to me, but to make it happen depends on it having a sponsor.
Owned by a husband and wife team, the Dutch lottery (Nationale Postcode Loterij) has a great deal of money to donate to charity each year. After a first successful meeting outside Amsterdam in September 2005, both owners arranged to fly out to visit the Cabaceiras within a few weeks, thereby putting the development of the Cabaceiras on a roller-coaster. Unfortunately, at the last minute only one, Annemieke, could come. Yet come she did, like a knight on a white horse, to help this neglected place. Alas, the portfolio of potential projects that we had hoped to do together fell by the wayside, but two or three remained, of which one was guaranteed to be the secondary school in the summer palace by the sea. In meetings with Annemieke and the local leaders, the District Administrator and provincial officials, Mees, me and Annemieke’s entourage, the promise was repeated and gratefully accepted because what the village needs more than anything else are schools.
It has taken much longer than planned on that whirlwind tour to get this secondary school off the ground, but after a great deal of toing and froing with applications and documents in the Netherlands, phase one of our joint venture can finally start. Stichting DOEN, another Dutch charity founded by the dynamic duo at the lottery, will pay for the development of the secondary school and a number of other proposed projects. So the experts who have sat patiently in the wings waiting to make their drawings and plans can actually get started, and 2007 should see the realization of every Cabaceirian’s dream: a secondary school that their children can get to. Dozens of villagers who have sent their children to Nampula can then bring them back home, and hundreds of parents whose children have nothing to do and nowhere to go will have the chance to see them get the education they long for.
As I keep saying (as much to myself as to anyone else), I never planned to start a training college although I did plan, eventually, to start a foundation. It was all something for later that took off prematurely under its own momentum. Even after Mossuril District became the chosen place, it only happened as it did because in April 2004 the Mozambican Ministry of Culture informed me that the government of Mozambique was now ready to hand over the ruined palaceu. While the government was ready, I was not. I still needed to create a legal entity, a registered charity for it to be handed over to. I had been told that everything official was painfully slow in Mozambique, and yet suddenly any delay was threatening to be on my part.
In one day in Holland, Teran Foundation was founded and Morripa’s college dream began to become a reality. It was a dream that happened to be not so far away from my own long-term dream of starting some community work in Africa.
I had, and have, no qualification whatsoever to start a training college, but Morripa and the villagers wanted and needed it. At least I was older and better trained in the University of Life than I had been when I started farming in Venezuela. And I was certainly better qualified than any of the villagers were to get such a project going. I could combine it with a Faculty of Agriculture to bring fresh food into the area. Were it not for the vitamin C from the odd lime, tomato and piri-piri pepper, the villagers could add scurvy to the list of diseases caused by the widespread severe sub-nutrition.
It certainly isn’t a qualification for running a training college, but I do have strange childhood memories of the one my mother attended in Tooting Bec, South London, starting when I was five years old. She stayed there for three years as a mature student and I often went with her and sat in the library or common room waiting for her lessons to end. I was sick and off school and she didn’t want to leave me at home alone, so we took the bus together and I sat in on what seemed like endless bickering, coded courtships and common-room dramas. So it shouldn’t have come as quite such a surprise that certain aspects of college life are like endless reruns of a Brazilian soap opera. Tiny grievances escalate and fester and romance blossoms and dies leaving trails of rancour in its wake. Even some of the elements of hardship which have hallmarked the setting up of this particular training college were echoed in my past.
When my mother quit the dead-end job she had taken to make ends meet in the aftermath of her separation from my father and enrolled as a mature student, our family skirted the nearest we have ever come to actual poverty. As a student in London in 1968 she was entitled to a student grant. This was just enough for a teenager to get by on in digs and a meagre diet. No allowance was made, however, for my mother’s four ravenous daughters. So for three years she eked out her grant to try and sate our prodigious appetites. If one of us ate a little more than her share of the porridge, mashed potatoes and tinned pilchards that were our staple diet, another of us went hungry.
Since my mother’s pride never allowed us to admit to the semi-permanent emptiness of our stomachs, she insisted that whenever we were out, we all had to refuse any offers of food three times before we were allowed to accept one. I can still remember the anguish I felt in other people’s houses where proper food was on offer. Out of respect, I turned down all the tempting offers once, twice and then thrice, praying fervently to the powers that be that a fourth chance would ensue. And I can still remember each of the disappointments when it didn’t. Nearly five decades later, such memories allow me to understand how little anyone can concentrate on other things with an empty stomach.
By the time I arrived to actually live here, one of the three walled gardens was an oasis of fresh salads and vegetables. Also, against all the odds, the crows and foul pest, a batch of scrawny home-bred Macua chickens were making regular appearances in a curry sauce at the long refectory table. Ludicrous as it may sound, even buying fish on this seashore isn’t easy. Even after two years, keeping up a supply of fresh fish is so Kafkaesque that Morripa is starting his own fish farm.
One day, a fisherman might bring a 30-kilogram marlin or tuna, but then several days can go by without there being any catch at all. The local fishermen are not used to selling. They subsist. Even when the fishermen are prepared to sell their catch (which is not often), five little fishes the size of my index finger cannot feed the fifty to ninety people who lunch and/or dine at the college every day (excluding visitors to our training restaurant). With no refrigeration, no ice, no electricity, no car and a very low food budget, buying an entire marlin or tuna was out of the question for a one-off feast and none of the cooks were able to repeat the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand with the mini fish.
I used to think the hundreds of fishermen had joined the ranks of our enemies – which we do, of course, have – and were starving the college out by refusing to sell us their catches. It was only by ferrying backwards and forwards to Ilha by dhow that I realized that without proper nets or lines or hooks and with so few boats, there were hundreds of fishermen but, like the rest of the population, most of them were unemployed. Day by day, someone in the family would scrounge around in the shallows casting a short line into the rich waters in the hopes that some intellectually challenged fish would ignore the fisherman’s presence and shadow and bite his crude bait-less hook anyway. If a man waits in the mangrove for long enough, he can guddle or grab enough little fish to take home. Since money hardly circulates here and there is no wa
y out to any other market where it does, a bigger catch would go to waste. If anyone is lucky enough to get a proper catch, he sails to Ilha to sell it rather than take it home. It has taken over two years to persuade the local fisherman to bring those lucky catches to us.
Since July 2006 when the college training restaurant ‘2 Coqueiros’ finally opened, we have savoured the culinary treats we now get there every day and never take the fish and chips that are the mainstay of our menu for granted. Each meal feels rather like the day when my mother graduated and got a job and put nice food back on our table.
Having survived the first two years and its giant learning curve, we have learned to stand and are learning to walk so that in the future we may have the strength to run. Looking back, though, I see that for the first six months it was touch and go whether we would make it. We had a big plan and a big concept. We had a ruined palace on the edge of the Indian Ocean and the tacit support of thousands of villagers. We now have the active support of about six hundred local people, ninety of whom are already on our payroll. We have restored 65 per cent of the college building; we have the training restaurant and three market gardens, a poultry farm and a medicinal plant garden and pharmacy. We also have several satellite projects in health, micro-finance, culture and literacy. And last, but not least, we also have a few friends ‘out there’ and a few more enemies.
XIII
Varanda: A Slice of Paradise
I LIVE TWO LIVES HERE: that of Varanda, the nature reserve on the beach where home is an Out of Africa camp, and then there is my life at the college. Although the two are linked in a joint effort to bring some movement to two otherwise still villages, and although there is only a distance of eight kilometres across salt flats, mangroves and dunes between them, life in one and the other is very different. Not least, a day at Varanda is hugely relaxing, while a day at the college is one of continual small actions.
Varanda is the sort of place Europeans dream about. It is both a peninsula and an island with over four kilometres of virgin beaches. It has white sand and warm, almost transparent waters streaked with aquamarine and turquoise. Protected by a coral reef and frequented by dolphins, the sea here is safe and gentle. There are no sharks or dangers beyond the occasional sharp coral underfoot when wading through a meandering lagoon.
Twice a day, at unfathomable hours known only to the local fishermen, the sea streams into the lagoon and turns it from a series of natural swimming pools into a churning saltwater river flooding the surrounding countryside. When the tide is out, ivory-coloured sand ripples towards the neighbouring islands, and halfway to Ilha itself. When the tide is high, thousands of hectares of mangroves stand in two metres of water, and part of the one road and all of the footpaths lie underwater. Then no one can get into the local village of Cabaceira Pequena and no one can get out, except by boat.
Varanda is inhabited by plants, birds, fish and various animals. The only people who come here are the local fishermen who stash their dugout canoes on some of the beaches. Occasionally, a lone prawn fisherman from Cabaceira Pequena will come to scan and scour the sandbed of the lagoon. A boy will stand for hours knee-deep in the still water waiting for the transparent prawns to feel at ease with his presence. From a distance I used to wonder why someone would appear to petrify and stare glazed-eyed for so long. I thought it might be yet another of the thousands of traditional ceremonies of the tradição. However, it was not about religion, just common sense, not to frighten his prey away.
On the whole, though, Varanda is more about not meeting people than meeting them. There are mangrove cuckoos and herons, storks and egrets, bluebirds with turquoise fantails, parrots and blue and scarlet finches. In the rainy season, the dunes erupt with lilies great and small. What looks like tufts of short grass are actually miniature wild orchids. When the rains come, everything bursts into flower. But it hardly ever rains.
In November there are the so-called short rains in the form of intermittent torrential showers, which stop and start abruptly. Within half an hour of one of these drenchings, there is no sign of it having been. Then, in December and January, there are the long rains. By the time they come, the land, the wells and the people are desperate for water. The long rains fall in sheets and can last for hours. It is the long rains that sustain all the trees and the manioc and fill the wells and waterholes. There are no sweet-water rivers here: only endless rivers and rivulets of seawater, streaming in and out of the Indian Ocean.
The previous owners of Varanda were a Dutch couple who lived in Nampula and were shown the beauty spot by friends. The land was owned by the local community with little segments here and there pertaining to various local families. The Dutchman was working as the director of the Dutch charity SNV and he and his wife felt confident that they could get land title if they put enough time, energy and patience into the process. To that end, they started a Mozambican company and went through all the bureaucratic hurdles required to get it registered and running, and then they set about buying the land (which, rather embarrassingly, they got for a song and then sold on to Mees at an enormous profit before heading off to the other side of the planet). When they finally got the necessary documentation in 1999, they began to run a community project together with the village of Cabaceira Pequena. A group of sixteen workers under the command of the ubiquitous Morripa were enrolled as nature guards.
These were the first proper jobs in the village. At the end of each month, sixteen people took home a salary sufficient to support up to thirty family members. It was the first time that anyone had taken the time to help local people, to bring the supplies unobtainable locally so that carpenters could have nails and glue, and metalworkers could have zinc plates and iron. For his services, which in the early years were (by his own wish) always donated, Morripa got a motorbike and a mobile phone.
It has been said that the combined salaries of all the local guards and the sum total of all the bundles of palm leaves that have been donated to the village and the cement blocks and other materials for the health post in Cabaceira Grande amount to far less than the profit the Dutch couple made on the land sale. But in a land of endless injustices, that may just be one more notched up on the poverty totem.
The previous owners planted eight thousand trees on Varanda between 2000 and 2002, many of which died almost instantaneously while the remainder have been struggling ever since. These coconut palms and various local trees are not dwarf varieties, they are just dwarfed by the lack of water, the continuous sea breeze and zero protection from hot sun. When we started the college, I took it upon myself to do a bit of gardening at Varanda, mulching the trees and weeding round them, erecting bamboo windbreaks where the coconut palms were suffering most and generally tinkering with the plants.
Like a lost tribe, the Cabaceirians have had to look after themselves. By looking after each other they have preserved and in some cases distilled an essence of what is good in life. Their staple diet of corn and manioc flour may cocoon them in lethargy, and some solutions that seem so simple to a Westerner as to be ludicrous not to implement them may have passed them all by, yet let’s not forget that despite stuff dropping down since time immemorial, no one noticed gravity until it was pointed out by Sir Isaac Newton. In Nampula, it is the custom among some of the foreign aid employees and well-to-do locals to mock villagers for their lack of what might be taken for granted as common sense. Among the expatriates in the cities, there is little allowance made for the fact that common sense can vary from place to place. What is second nature to someone born and bred to the sea or the bush may elude a foreign expert.
One of the more striking aspects of living in this particular so-called ‘backward rural community’ is the virtual absence of crime. If something does get stolen, the local al’mo sits on a mat under a mango tree and writes out cabalistic signs, which are supposed to make the offender either return the goods, confess, or both. Failure to do either will result in the thief’s belly swelling up and for him, or her, to be
racked by pain. Although most of the college goods are safe in the hands of its students and workers, there was a string of petty thefts which lasted for nearly a year. Most of what went missing were little things, but here in the bush, those same little things are often crucial. Morripa tipped me off that one of the newer students was a suspect in these crimes and should be expelled forthwith. In the absence of proof, and trying to follow in my mother’s footsteps of always giving the maladjusted a second chance, I stubborned it out and let the student in question remain.
One surprisingly chilly morning in March 2006, two policemen arrived in our courtyard. They explained that they were chasing a criminal who had been caught red-handed robbing his neighbour’s storeroom the night before. With no transport and no telephone, the victim of the theft had tied up the young thief. At dawn, a runner was sent to fetch the police from Mossuril. Meanwhile, the robber had escaped and fled, and was believed to be hiding out in the mangroves of Cabaceira Pequena. After all this had been explained to me, I asked what I could do, and one of the policemen told me, ‘We just thought you should know because he is one of your students.’
Sure enough, he was the same one Morripa had tried to expel. Two days later, some of the villagers from Cabaceira Pequena caught the run-away and delivered him battered and bound to the roofless police station in town. I asked if he had been badly hurt and was told, ‘Badly enough … We can’t have thieves here. We are poor enough as it is. And the storeroom he robbed was his best friend’s uncle’s. It isn’t his first time, either. He was caught and beaten by the community last year. His family are good, but he is bad.’
Mozambique Mysteries Page 14