On 10 December 2004, the first term came to an end. Eleven of the first fourteen volunteers and staff had left either of their own volition or mine or through sickness. That left Ellie and Ramon, Mauro and the new team chosen to come out and help. This new team was chosen by the new criteria. First and foremost, they had to care. Secondly, they had to have a good sense of humour. Thirdly, they had to have initiative and/or experience roughing it. In real terms, the latter meant that they had, at least, to have been camping.
For our new start, it was the family from Maputo who stepped into the breach: Sofia (she of the kitchen), Isabel and Tigo (he of the dreadlocks and incredibly long legs). This team comprising a mother, daughter and son are the family of Neco, a musician friend in the Netherlands. Beyond the border of isolation in which Mossuril lies, across the length and breadth of most of the rest of Mozambique, Neco is a household name as one of the country’s most famous musical stars. Born in Maputo into a musical family of eight brothers and sisters, Neco showed an early and remarkable talent. While still a boy, he toured in the family band and then went to Johannesburg with two of his brothers to make his name abroad. The African fusion music he plays, sings and writes is now making him a name in Europe, but he is also a virtuoso classical guitarist and an operatic tenor. For some years he has studied at the Rotterdam Music Conservatory while playing gigs on the side.
When Don Mattera, the South African gangster-cum-saintly-popular-hero, visited Amsterdam, a group of his admirers decided to throw a party for him, to which all the Dutch people who helped end apartheid would be invited. It quickly turned into a grand affair begging for some live music. Esther, one of the organizers and a close friend of Don’s, also had links to the music world. It was she who introduced me to Neco.
Although there are thousands of young people who would like to come out and help in Africa, it is both hard for them to know where to go, and even harder for projects like ours to get hold of the potential pool of willing and expert hands. So far, most of our international volunteers have come via friends. Tigo & Co arrived by sheer chance via Neco.
On the night of our Dutch–South African party, Neco turned up and gave a performance which earned him both a standing ovation and the chance to dance the tribal celebration of the Zulu with Don Mattera himself. From then on, whenever Mees and I held a Mozambican evening in Amsterdam, Neco was invited to play. At a subsequent investors’ meeting, a short film was shown of the Cabaceiras, Varanda, the college and the villages. When all the guests had gone and Neco was packing up his guitar, he asked if Mozambicans as well as foreigners could volunteer as staff for the college. I explained that this was Morripa’s and my dream, but the conditions were still too harsh to host his average compatriot. What to a foreigner could seem like an adventure, to a national could seem like hell.
‘I think my family would like to go and help,’ he told me. ‘Let me call them and explain.’
I gave him some brochures and as much information as I could; and thought it a long shot, to say the least.
But ten days later, Neco came back and told me that three of his family were willing to go out to the Cabaceiras to help. The only thing stopping them was money. If airfares to Nampula could be found and a few hundred dollars a month, then Sofia, his mother, Isabel, his sister, and Castigo (Tigo) his brother were ready to take up community service.
Ever since they arrived, they have been the backbone of the college. Sofia is a professional cook, Isabel is a professional singer and dancer, and Tigo has found his niche teaching English and Portuguese and also gradually rewiring the entire building. Far away and long ago, Tigo was an electrician in Maputo.
Despite being Mozambicans, their culture shock was nearly as great as the international team’s. They had no idea that such poverty existed in their own land. Their ethnic group and language is Shona. Once they settled in, not speaking Macua was their biggest problem. The monotonous diet of rice, fish and beans was a hot second. As a close-knit family, they brought stability and a determination to help. They have made an enormous difference to the project and in return have grown fond of the area. Between them, they have bought a little house and some land in Chocas-Mar, and at weekends Sofia takes pleasure in fixing the place up for future family visits and planting a garden.
Isabel arrived full of ideas and suggestions, including the starting up of a Cultural Centre (Casa Cultural) for the village. Sadly, she was knocked down by severe malaria and had to fly back to Maputo for emergency treatment. Just as Isabel was about to return from Maputo, Neco made a breakthrough in the Netherlands and was offered a proper concert at Rotterdam’s prestigious Doelen, the biggest Dutch concert hall. He wanted Isabel and another of their sisters to back the band. Isabel flew to Holland and thereby missed the opening of the Cultural Centre she was supposed to run.
Meanwhile, a food-distribution programme in Mossuril town had just come to an end and Jorge, who had been working on it briefly, was at a loose end so, introduced by Ramon, who had met him over a beer in Chocas, he joined the college staff. Jorge comes from Nacala and is Macua. Within days of arriving, he began to work as head of orientation. He could unravel mysteries to new students where others can’t. He and Tigo became very close friends and spent much of their spare time together. Both were close to ‘Dr’ Roche. When Jorge’s interest in the college flagged and he eventually left, we were all happy that Tigo chose to stay. After eighteen months of living in the Cabaceiras, Tigo’s network within the village is extensive.
In January 2006, a charismatic young man called Tauacal Victorino came to see me. He told me (in fluent English) that he was born and brought up in Cabaceira Grande, where he attended school until fourth-year primary. After that, he walked to Chocas every day for his fifth year. After that, he walked to Mossuril every day to get to seventh-year primary. There is nowhere else to walk to school after Mossuril. The next stop is Monapo, nearly 100 kilometres away. So Tauacal’s parents sent him to school in Nampula, where he survived on a diet of learning and semi-starvation. Each year his parents scraped the money together until he passed his tenth grade.
‘Now I want to get ten A and ten B and train to be a teacher, but my parents are reduced to nothing: there is no way they can help me even to enrol. So I want to help here at the college and save up enough to pay my own way. I can motivate students from here because they all know me.’
He started on his month’s trial and proved to be a star. All new students now get eight weeks of ‘Professor’ Tauacal’s orientation course and make very rapid progress. The years of hunger have taken their toll on their new teacher, giving him an almost insatiable appetite. The extra food is a small price to pay for his constant good will and dedication and his innate gifts as a teacher. Luckily for the college, from joining for one year, Tauacal has decided to stay for three.
One of the things that any project needs is enormous amounts of positive energy. Tauacal exudes it. He has a ready grin and a quick mind brimful of new ideas, and because he is a local boy who has made good, he is the perfect example of what others here can do. Having struggled to learn English in Nampula, he knows exactly which are the difficult words and concepts, and he cajoles the students over their language hurdles with such compassion and skill that he is a pleasure to work with. He is the first to pounce on any new books that arrive via our post box and he has such a hunger for knowledge that he stays up most of each night reading in his mud hut.
Whereas so many of his compatriots lack confidence, Tauacal is brimful of it. He tends to refer to himself as Tauacal, and relates episodes of his life in the third person. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about him is that he has one foot firmly planted in the past and the other as firmly in the future, and having mastered this conjuring trick he is determined to show every member of the village he loves how to hold the same stance.
A few months after Tauacal’s arrival, Sofia left us to nurse her sick mother in Maputo, thereby leaving not only a serious gap in the kitchen, but also a
social void. This was filled by Ana Cristina from Monapo. Many of the steps forward the college takes occur by chance, and it was a chance meeting that brought Ana Cristina our way. I have been into Monapo town (sede) only about three times in four years because it is several kilometres off the main road. However, limited as Monapo’s resources may be, I learned from our new driver/mechanic (who went to school there) that it has a bank and an ATM machine. This might not sound remarkable, but here in north Mozambique it is. Furthermore, whereas in Nampula one can stand for up to two hours in an ATM machine queue waiting to draw cash, in Monapo there is hardly any queue for the same service.
Therefore, one day just after the training restaurant opened, on a beer run to Nampula, we detoured to Monapo to visit this ATM machine. As luck would have it, there was a small queue. I took my place and waited while a girl at the head stuck her card in the machine and typed in her password. Only she typed in the wrong password three times in a row and jammed the machine. It took forty minutes to start the cash point up again. Meanwhile, I noticed a young mixed-race woman beside me and felt a sudden urge to speak to her. This in itself surprised me because I am shy and usually neither speak to strangers nor feel the urge to. But my intuition told me to speak to this one, who turned out to be Ana Cristina, a professional but unemployed chef in search of a job.
Within a week, Ana Cristina had moved into the college and was galvanizing the cooking teams with her professionalism and her way with pastry. Within three weeks, her six-year-old daughter, Vivi, had joined her.
Uphill as the teaching challenge is, the college now has a team. It is joined by visiting volunteers and the departure of each is a wrench for the ones who stay. Volunteering for short or long stints is not for the faint-hearted: it is tough and endlessly frustrating. But for those who care, the lack of money is compensated for by the rewards of seeing positive results. We are lucky to have our core staff, but we have also been lucky with many of our short-term international volunteers.
There isn’t space to mention all of them here, but that doesn’t mean that the college and I thank them any the less for having joined us. The first of many after our new start arrived within weeks of Dona Sofia and her children in January 2005. Marna van Hal is a Dutch graduate who found me in Amsterdam (via a friend in Nampula). I was apprehensive about sending out any more foreign volunteers until the new national staff had had a chance to settle in. Rather than encourage Marna, an enormously enthusiastic girl, I did my utmost to discourage her; but she kept coming back to my office and asking to be given a chance. Once it was really clear to her that working in the Cabaceiras was a tough assignment, and the loos needed buckets of water to flush them, and the food was monotonous, and the village was about as isolated as could be, and the beaches were a hot walk away, Marna signed on for three months.
She was an instant success, and it is pages from her diary that are given to new would-be volunteers to show what it is like on the edge of the world.
Danny and Ulla, from England and Finland respectively, also fitted into the project from the start. Danny had contracted a truly disgusting skin disease while travelling up through Southern Africa and much of his visit was marred by the state of his feet. Despite this handicap, both of them made a difference and, like Marna and Mauro, their exploits entered the village myths. The workers still talk about Ulla’s extraordinary energy and strength as she installed the new Moments of Joy storeroom.
After endless lessons in which students pretended to mix drinks and serve food, and pretended to pass each other kitchen utensils, laboriously learning the names of each in English, a qualified chef was anxiously awaited. There is only so much of holding up a whisk and asking, ‘What is this?’, and the class chanting back, ‘That is a whisk,’ that can be borne.
‘Where is the whisk?’
‘The whisk is in the big plastic jug.’
‘What is this?’
‘That is a saucepan lid.’
‘Where is the saucepan lid?’
‘The saucepan lid is in the rack,’ or ‘In your left hand,’ or, ‘On the saucepan.’
By September 2005, all the whisks and lids and pans were in place and all that was missing was a chef to start teaching what to do with them all beyond the daily rice and fish and beans, matapa, basic salads, grilled chicken and some delicious fried biscuits that came under Dona Sofia’s domain. Sofia had made it clear she did not want to enforce any rules or methods in the kitchen. She cooked and students could watch and help, but Sofia did not want to actively teach. There had been talk of this and that chef coming out but when it came down to making the arrangements, other things kept coming up and all three candidates rain-checked.
Then Michelle arrived. I had met her very briefly at a literary festival in the Lake District (to which, I subsequently learned, she had been reluctantly dragged by her mother). I have taken to giving the Cabaceirians a plug wherever and whenever I can, and the Lake District was no exception. Michelle came up to me in the bar after my reading and asked me more about the college. She told me she was a chef. Since chefs, waiters and barmen are the people we most need in the tourism sector, I gave her as much information as I could.
It turned out that a close friend of hers had helped set up a community lodge project near Lichinga, in the far northwest of Mozambique, and Michelle was intrigued by the idea of following in her footsteps and going out to do her bit. We corresponded fairly irregularly for over six months and then at the beginning of October 2005, armed with a striped butcher’s apron and an extremely valuable carving knife, she arrived in Nampula.
On her first day of teaching, she was very nervous and so was I. Apart from the five starfish hooked onto nails over the front door to denote the five stars we aspire to, Michelle was the first five-star anyone to come our way. If she succeeded in teaching any of the first class how to cook anything other than the fish, beans and rice to a five-star way, then I knew we would be able to keep going until enough of the students were similarly trained and the tourist classes could serve their purpose.
If, however, her trying to teach a local group proved absolutely impossible, we as a college would have to lower our sights, albeit temporarily. Because the only available jobs we could guarantee were to be for the two barefoot luxury lodges coming to the area, we needed to get the students up to that level. A failure to do so would result in a failure to secure over a hundred jobs for them.
The evening before, a flagon of wine had circulated freely on the veranda and, between other talk, Michelle and I had discussed kitchen strategy.
By 9.50am and Jolly Jus break-time, without a word of Portuguese and with conditions entirely unsuited to her elevated status as ‘chef to the stars’, Michelle Oldroyd was turning the battle her way. By the end of the day, a class of four students – Ancha, Anifa, Victorino and Sumaila – could chop and peel like restaurant kitchen pros. Over the next four weeks, Michelle taught the same and three other groups how to make Spanish omelette, a tuna salad that looked like something out of a foodie magazine, banoffee pie, Thai pumpkin soup and numerous other recipes.
Although her contribution was fantastic, the giving of it was taking its toll on her. There had been no time to adjust to the culture shock, no time to find the rhythm of the village, no time to get her bearings and find a way to deal with domestic ties back in Europe in this unnaturally faraway place. As though to mock her attempts to settle in, she became the victim of random drop in all its manifestations. Her emails disappeared into cyber space in Nampula, her phone calls were truncated and her mobile got caught on the sing-song loop of ‘Liga mais tarde’.
I think the thing that really freaked her out was something she saw after distributing the Thai pumpkin soup to all her students to take home with them. She had a star pupil: someone she told me was truly gifted and could go far. She also had some cookery duds whom she recommended be barred from the kitchen thereafter. Her star pupil was a great satisfaction to her, so it was doubly disturbing when she saw
her tipping half a litre of used cooking oil all over her delicately flavoured soup before taking it home.
Michelle was appalled. ‘How could she do that? She’s ruined the whole dish!’
Reflecting on this, her set of perceptions and values shifted. This teaching wasn’t about cooking gorgeous little nibbly things: this was about people who were actually starving. This incident took the wind out of Michelle’s sails and, coinciding with domestic hiccups, she cut her tour short by a month and set off to do some travelling.
The first to do anything has the hardest time. No one understood what to expect of Michelle until she arrived. Any other chef has had his or her way paved now. Starting with students who have some concept of basic kitchen skills and ingredients, recipes and cuisine is easier by far than what Michelle pioneered.
She stayed long enough to prove that the cookery side of things is possible. Yet she probably left too soon to have really enjoyed her stay. In a give and take, she gave an enormous amount and, I suspect, got back little more than a sensory overload exacerbated by two incredibly stressful trips to Nampula within her four-week span.
Future specialists, if they can, should come for a minimum of eight weeks and take several days to acclimatize before even attempting to start. Despite that, the results Professora Michelle produced in under four weeks have become legendary in the neighbourhood. In the end, her efforts to buy and donate a gas cooker to the college proved her undoing. Trying to buy anything in Nampula is a nightmare. It was her dream to teach the students to bake and make cakes. It proved quite impossible to buy a cooker on both attempts and the disappointment was huge.
Mozambique Mysteries Page 26