Mozambique!

After a wonderful time in South Africa with our equally wonderful family it was time for a little service project in Mozambique.

Mosquito nets--here we come!

A family friend works for a service organization called Care for Life . He invited us over to work on a little small business consulting. Care for Life has a really cool program where local community leaders are approached and invited to participate in a project where they receive all sorts of training and in turn train other leaders picked by the village and then go out and help the individual families of the community to set goals to make their lives better. The training and goals are varied but all revolve around health, education, home maintenance, child health care, AIDS care, and small business development. Families set goals (ex: build a latrine) and local leaders follow up on their progress. Every so often the data of their goals is gathered and reported and those who have succeeded in their goals are rewarded with little things like a shovel or mosquito nets.

Our first day was spent listening to a community meeting where a micro-credit group was being formed. It was so fascinating to discover how spoilt I have been. Everything was in Portuguese and even though French is fairly similar I only understood 50% of the conversation and I looked around me and assessed the situation. Mangy dogs running amidst the concrete houses with corrugated iron roofs. Laundry hanging next to a charcoal fire, little children with symptoms of malnutrition, flies everywhere, Rhianna blasting from a dilapidated hut, rubbish and human waste everywhere. 

Everyone looked surprisingly happy. 

This woman is selling dried fish--yum

The community leaders took us on a tour of the village so we could have an idea of what kind of businesses people have. I learned that I wasn't even capable of fathoming a poverty and lifestyle like this. People don't usually live to be older than 42 because of all of the diseases and people live on less than $3.00 a day to feed their families in a country where a box of cereal costs $4.00. Life has to become simple. A lot of ambitions are smothered in the everyday practicalities of a system that doesn't allow for much growth.

That was my first day in a developing country.