Mozambique Mysteries

by Lisa St Aubin De Teran

  ‘We don’t have a single doctor. The nurses are brilliant and I don’t know how they manage as well as they do, but some of their formal qualifications are only to trainee status. Schools, health and banks – you name it, this is a forgotten zone. Our one hope of getting out of this mess is to develop international tourism.’

  What began as a mission of mercy became a daily pleasure. The more I commuted, the stronger I became and the less arduous the miles of walking. I made friends with Marufo and learnt a lot about his family. He and his brother were two of the few villagers to get away and get an education. Marufo had been to secondary school on Ilha (with Morripa). He had commuted by boat, missing endless days when the sea forbade the crossing. By lamplight, he had made up his lost lessons and passed his exams. His brother before him had also got himself through school.

  ‘My brother and I were very close. We both loved our village and we both decided to do something to make it better. We saw that some of the others couldn’t see a future because they couldn’t see past all the obstacles, but we could. I know that if we can unite and do things together, we can make this a much better place.’

  He told me that his brother had gone to Nampula and got a good job as a government driver. Drivers earn three times the minimum wage and thereby have the opportunity to pull their entire families out of the poverty trap. In the first week of May, the week I arrived at the college, his brother was killed in a car crash. A speeding chapas had smashed into his car.

  ‘Now it’s just me left to do the things we planned.’

  Marufo lives with his mother, grandmother, aunts and his adorable baby daughter, Fifi. Aged twenty, he married for love and Fifi is the fruit of that marriage. When his daughter was eight months old, his wife ran away to Nampula, leaving Marufo to bring up Fifi. He is a doting parent. On days when he cannot leave her, he carries his pretty little daughter on his shoulder across the mangrove to school. She is shy and clings to him, but plays happily with Bia and the handful of other toddlers in the college crèche. When we eventually get a proper kindergarten going, Fifi will be one of the star pupils.

  Meanwhile, a chance photo of this charming toddler caught the attention of a friend of the college in the Netherlands. Fifi will now receive forty euros per month until she is eighteen. In real terms, the equivalent of a Mozambican worker’s minimum wage (as paid to that lucky 7 per cent of the population) will enter Fifi’s household for many years to come. Little Fifi will have better food, a mosquito net, medicines, clothes, shoes, school books and many other things besides. For Nicolette, her Dutch sponsor, there is not only the satisfaction of helping a poor family have a better standard of living with the certainty that her money goes directly to help a child in need, she will also have a personal connection and regular reports and photos of ‘her’ child. One day, hopefully, they will meet. When they do, Nicolette will be more than a tourist visiting the village. She will be a welcome and long-standing friend.

  I learned more on my walks through the mangrove in the two summer months of 2005 than I had in all my time before. Marufo’s brother had just died and he was quietly grieving. My own sister, Lali, had also died the previous February, and I too was quietly grieving. Lali was the sister closest to me in age. Less than two years apart, we grew up together with a special closeness. The circumstances of our lives conspired to keep us physically much farther apart than we wanted to be and as we grew older, we shared a dream of one day living together, she, I and Anna (the next sister up from her) with our partners and children somewhere warm and beautiful. In our shared dream, we three sisters would sit in our old age on rocking chairs on a long sunny veranda.

  Night by night as I sat and stared up at the canopy of stars on the long veranda at the college, I thought of Lali. It seemed ironic to be out here alone. Of all the family, she was the person with the most generous and purest heart. The need to remember her and talk about her was great. This was something I could do with Ellie, Lali’s and my niece. Ellie was grieving without closure for the aunt she had virtually grown up with. After a long battle with cancer which she seemed to be winning, her death had come too suddenly for Ellie to make the long trek back either to see her or attend her Spanish funeral.

  When the classes were over and the oil lamps lit, when the vegetables were watered and the wells closed, when the was supper was served and the kitchen cleaned, when the chickens were locked away from marauding genets and the goat was tethered, when the guards had changed shift and all was quiet except for the distant drums, Ellie and I could share memories of Lali.

  Because Marufo was similarly bereaved, when we walked back and forth through the mangroves, we swapped stories of our lost brother and sister. He also shared a love of medicinal plants and taught me to recognize many local varieties, describing their preparation and uses. I saw the flora and fauna of the sand flats in more detail than I ever had before. Each day, I looked forward to the quiet beauty of the inland sea.

  I was getting to feel more and more what it was like to be a Cabaceirian. I was following their footsteps along paths trodden through the centuries. One afternoon, we were delayed in the village. Just as we were about to leave, Marufo told me that his grandmother was dying. She had been treated for malaria at the hospital in Monapo and not responded to the treatment. She was semi-comatose in their house. And it was a house rather than a mud hut. It was a semi-restored ruin overlooking Ilha from the days when Cabaceira was a trading port.

  Marufo asked me to treat her with Malarone and led me to her. ‘She says her time has come and she has said goodbye to all of us, but before this fever she was strong. I would like you to try.’

  We could have gone there first, but it was typical of Marufo not to ask for anything for himself. He always makes it very clear that the extra time and energy he gives to the college are his contribution to the community. Inside the house, in a back room, the stick-thin old lady was curled up on a mat on a bed. Beside her, a huddle of other women, some of them almost equally old, were sitting sorrowfully watching the sick grandmother.

  Marufo spoke in Macua and all the nurses and watchers looked up. One came forward and was introduced as his mother. None spoke any Portuguese. Via Marufo, I described how they should take the Malarone and I left chemical tissue salts to be administered with water. By the next day, the grandmother had rallied and changed her mind. She wasn’t going to die after all. Instead she was being spoon-fed some rice soup and via Marufo she thanked me for the pills.

  It cost 12 dollars to save the old lady’s life. That isn’t a lot, but multiplied by the number of villagers who would also need it, it was too much for me. Mees was in Holland and is an inveterate surfer of the net. He sits for hours sometimes in the early morning randomly discovering new things. I told him that we had a malaria crisis and what he thought we should do. He chanced on a report from Washington about breakthrough results treating malaria with artemisia-based pills. The Chinese have been using artemisia for 2,000 years. During the Vietnam War, the Viet Cong were losing so many men and women to malaria in the damp network of tunnels they built and lived in that they begged the Chinese to help. The People’s Republic of China duly supplied hundreds of thousands of artemisia tablets, to great and immediate effect.

  Artemisia absinthium is better known in Europe as the base of absinthe, the liquor that sent so many poets and painters mad and blind. When not fermented and when not heated, this age-old cure was also widely used in Europe as a purge. Better known as wormwood, the bitter substance repels larvae, and was once used to cure intestinal worms. After some further research and a little experimentation, Mees and I came up with a herbal recipe that looks like the herbal remedy to tackle the local malaria. We made ourselves the guinea pigs and stopped taking Malarone or any other preventative. Local people who take the Artemisia absinthium-based cure do so at their own risk and of their own volition. Many of the cases we have treated are returnees from other malaria treatments at the local health centres or the hospitals.
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  So far, in fifteen months, 207 people have taken the remedy and so far, 203 have been cured. These include Ramon, me (thrice cured), Lolly (twice cured and once not responding), Dona Sofia, Tigo, Adamji and ‘Dr’ Roche himself, who called just before midnight one night to say he was very sick and could he have some of ‘that powder’. The guards and I take turns grinding the herbal mix in a Lebanese coffee grinder we brought out for the purpose. With a pharmaceutical scales and empty capsules, we have what we need. When we run out of capsules, we wrap the powder in aluminium foil squares and twist them up. Hopefully, a qualified medical researcher will come out and monitor this. Meanwhile, a cheap and simple treatment is keeping the death rate down.

  Ironically, the mystery of why there was no known cure growing in the vicinity of this fatal illness in Europe has been solved: there was. Wormwood grows wild there. The problem was that no one made the connection. Perhaps if fewer witches had been burned in earlier centuries, one of them could have handed the knowledge down.

  Bodily resistance to all the known patented anti-malarial drugs is growing worldwide. Just as quinine, the Devil’s Bark, was once scorned by Protestants for being tainted by Papism, so has artemisia been sadly ignored by the capitalist West for being tainted with Communism.

  We are not the first Westerners to dabble in wormwood. A Belgian pharmaceutical company announced a breakthrough with another variety of artemisia at the Artemisia Seminar in Gabon at the end of 2005. There is also an artemisia-planting experiment in Tanzania. The Chinese were even selling test artemisia tablets to Mozambique in the 1990s. But those tablets were prohibitively expensive and the experiment was dropped. Such tablets don’t have or need to be expensive. Artemisia is a weed with abundant foliage. Artemisia Ariva has become a mainstay of malaria treatment and Artemisia Combined Treatments (ACT) are the goal of the World Health Organization. But, Artemisia Absinthium is still being ignored.

  If we can lure some medical researcher here, the coming years could also bring a small pill factory to the village to bring out dirt-cheap antimalaria tablets to sell farther afield.

  Out of the many drum beats, the ones that have become recognizable are the drumming for the sick and the drumming for the dead. The tradição demands that the immediate family of the deceased gather for ten nights under the same roof. For each child stolen by the sea and each person seized by disease and poverty, the drums beat relentlessly. Those are the ones I don’t want to have to keep hearing, night after night.

  XXVIII

  Momade and the Farm

  WHEN MOMADE STARTED AT the college as a student in September 2004, he hardly spoke or understood a word of Portuguese. He was also shy and kept himself to himself. He did not join in much with the joking and camaraderie of the two cliques of other students. He wore a pair of super-baggy long shorts which he subconsciously stroked from time to time, thereby drawing attention to the fact they were his pride and joy. He struggled to keep up during lessons and his reports showed that he was embarrassed by his ignorance to the point where he rarely answered questions in class. I met him briefly when he enrolled and again during the opening days and then I didn’t meet him again until May. By that time, he had learnt a lot of Portuguese and a smattering of English.

  He is small and nimble. His lack of height seems to be from malnutrition if his prodigious appetite is anything to go by. All the students and workers have a camel-like ability to store food. They can eat quantities that I, with a naturally big appetite, just could not swallow. It is as though each knows that food is scarce and real nourishment scarcer. When presented with the opportunity of consuming nutritious substances, they stockpile for the lean future.

  Food is so limited here that no one has eaten or ever tried to eat most of the things others see as normal everyday fare. Some of the students, particularly under Michelle Oldroyd’s breakthrough guidance, are prepared to try new things. Not so Momade, who absolutely refuses to be steered towards anything that hints of what is foreign or new.

  At break-time and at the weekly dances and occasional parties, all the students and workers drink a beaker of Jolly Jus. Each sachet of artificially flavoured and coloured powder concentrate is diluted with two litres of water. Sachets cost a few cents each and are sold on almost every market stall and basket across the length and breadth of Mozambique. Jolly Jus comes in four flavours: raspberry, pineapple, orange and cola. The powder stains hands and tongues. Each ‘flavour’ is drowned by the chemical taste of whatever colourants and toxins lie therein. It is made in South Africa and has Arabic script and English on the packet. On the front, it claims to be a fruit-flavoured drink with vitamin C. On the back, in several languages, it claims to contain approved flavouring agents and approved colourants as well as phenylalanine. Other than this, it does not say which colourants or flavourings it contains or by whom they are approved.

  Such a glut of E colourants is anathema to a Western mother, and as part of a project designed to raise the local nutritional standards, this so-called juice should be at the top of the list for elimination. But the villagers love it. They drink it at home. They grew up on it and I have a sneaking suspicion that it is powerful enough to kill the bacteria in their drinking water. On my secret agenda, known only to myself, Morripa and a couple of other personnel, the replacement of chemical ‘juice’ with fresh fruit juice is a priority.

  Elsewhere this could be easily done, but in northern Mozambique there is virtually no fresh fruit beyond the seasonal mangoes and the cashew fruits. Thus for at least eight months of the year there is nothing to make fresh juice with. On Ilha and in Nampula, in Monapo and Nacala, when anyone asks for a fresh juice in a bar or restaurant, that juice comes fresh from a Parmalat packet. If one insists on asking for some other juice, then sometimes a waiter can dig out a rival make, but the concept of fresh fruit juice, smoothies and all the joys of vitamins fresh from the skin has yet to arrive.

  Meanwhile, in an attempt to rectify the fruit shortage long term, we are planting numerous trees and dozens of passionfruit vines. Once in a while, I manage to get enough limes from Nampula, or passionfruit from an old lady who lives far beyond Mossuril town, or oranges from Nacala, to provide freshly squeezed juice for all the students and workers. This expensive novelty is not met with universal joy. Most of them prefer the chemical stainer but they will, somewhat grudgingly, drink the day’s proffered nectar. That is, all except for Momade, who will have nothing to do with any juice that is not proper juice and proper juice comes out of a packet and stains your tongue.

  On Ilha, the Hotel Escondidinho has a new French couple running their kitchen with delightful results. Breakfasts include eggs and bacon (there isn’t a lot of bacon around in a predominantly Muslim town) and home-made jam, invariably fresh butter and espresso coffee. It also includes fresh fruit salad and juice. For months last summer the juice was usually cashew, which can have an interesting and quite pleasant flavour, but can also be bitter, and on a bad day, while still being fresh, can have an undertow flavour of vomit. For a couple of weeks, though, there was mandarin juice, which was such a treat the day I had it that I sailed back the next day for more.

  Fresh fruit and vegetables on Ilha for all the hotels, bars and restaurants – now numbering about a dozen – come from Nampula (200 kilometres) or Nacala (140 kilometres). An abundant supply virtually on their doorstep would not be unwelcome. For a few weeks, Vulai, one of the senior students, was taking lettuces, tomatoes and beetroots to sell to the hotels on Ilha, but until we get a regular supply, it messes up our local stocks to do this and we stopped selling after giving an initial taste of some of what could be available in the future. The lady at Escondidinho has a way with salads. A salad in Mozambique tends to be a couple of slices of green tomato with a lot of sliced raw onion round it. This may or may not lie on two or three very small lettuce leaves, which may or may not (subject to availability) have sliced cucumber with them.

  At the Compleixo Turístico in Chocas-Mar, the owners have a p
ipeline out there somewhere bringing white cabbages to their kitchen. It seems to arrive at the end of the week and last until about Tuesday. Finely sliced and served generously, it used to be the salad king of the neighbourhood. Now, on Ilha, a French lady makes real French salads worth crossing the water for.

  When the college opened, it was always the intention to use its very large walled garden to grow salads and vegetables. These were to start enriching the college food, then to increase to upgrade the local diet and then for excess products to be sold to boost the college kitty.

  We had the land, we had the tools, we had the workers and we had the seeds. The latter are like gold dust and cannot be obtained even in Nampula for love or money. Local people grow manioc. Local farmers wait for the rains and then grow tomatoes, onions, garlic, lettuces and hot piri-piri peppers. No other seeds are available, no other vegetables are eaten and few other vegetables are known.

  I very much wanted to start the vegetable garden myself but the final rush to get ready for the official delegation, to get the roof finished and the façade painted, to get the uniforms made and the party arrangements ready, to get the volunteers settled and sort out their (largely imaginary) health problems, rushing them to and from the hospital in Nampula just in case, took up the few days I had in Mossuril. So the tools and the seeds remained after I left, and no garden was started, so none could grow.

  Meanwhile, the volunteers and staff in particular were stuck with a diet consisting almost exclusively of fish, rice and beans. Delicious as each of these can be, without the benefit of herbs, spices, flavourings and accompanying vegetables and salads, they can become horribly monotonous. Letters of complaint about the food were emailed back to Holland in a steady stream, and replies urging for the seed to go into the ground were returned. From October to March, nothing happened. Not a stalk of parsley or a head of lettuce found its way to germination.