I live in a poor country. The third poorest in the world, according to
the Human Development Index. Living here has given me a much more nuanced,
textured, tactile understanding of
what poverty – and in contrast, wealth – actually means. Technically, the HDI
ranking means that Mozambique is the fourth least
developed country in the world, as the index is based on measurements of education
and health variables, not income. But I have come to understand why, when gauging
poverty, these categories make for much more accurate indicators than GDP, per
capita GDP, per capita GDP adjusted for purchasing power, consumption per
capita, or any other money-based criterion.
All of these measures try to capture the quality of life based on
economics: production, income or spending for the country as a whole, divided
across the population and taking into account the fact that prices vary greatly
from one country to the next. The first problem with these numbers is that they
assign a single value to the vastly differing experiences lived within each
country. Income inequality is no secret and development economists have created
the Gini index to measure inequality within a country, adding a degree of
complexity, but still leaving out much of the actual situation lived day-to-day.
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| A rainbow over my street in Chimoio |
In a country like Mozambique, these measures, along with those of
unemployment, also do not take into account that a many people are subsistence
farmers. They grow and eat much of their own food, rarely participating in the
greater money-based economy happening around them. In some cases, people do not
use money, because they have no source of income and there is nothing for them
to buy with it. They trade within their community. They build their houses out
of terra and capim they harvest locally. It is difficult to see what exactly
$579 in “income” per person per year actually means to someone living like this.
It was about this kind of poverty that I came to the Peace Corps
expecting to learn: rural villages with little or no electricity and without
running water, where life in the city is a dream and development is coming
slowly. I thought I would spend two years hauling water from a pump and doing
my business in a pit latrine; growing what I could to get through the hungry
season; teaching classes of 100 students who walked hours just to pack into a
classroom without enough chairs. This would give me a better understanding of
the immense challenges faced by a developing country in trying to combat
poverty.
Instead, I landed in lovely Chimoio: an urban oasis, when compared with
many Peace Corps sites. Here, the streets in the bustling city center are
paved. We even have three, count ‘em: 3! stoplights. There are various hotels (one
of which even features an elevator), two South African grocery stores, many
restaurants featuring exotic fare such as pizza and falafel. We have a large
provincial hospital and multiple private clinics for those who can afford their
services.
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| A few scenes from downtown Chimoio |
At the university where I teach we have projectors mounted in most of
the classrooms, laptops available from the IT department and two computer labs
connected to high-speed internet. We are hi-tech. My colleagues are part of
Mozambique’s up-and-coming middle class. As every article written about the country in the last year makes sure
to mention, Mozambique’s economy has been one of the fastest growing around, and
the quality of life is definitely on its way up for many. Some of my students
have cars. Many are the children of politicians, shop owners and other members
of Chimoio’s elite. The girls are chique
de matar: well-dressed, with shoes matching their belts matching their nail
polish.
When other PCVs come to Chimoio, this prosperous element is generally
what they see. It is probably the part they notice because it is what contrasts
with what they are living at their sites. Also, I live in a nice house. It is
spacious, with wood floors, large windows in almost every room and a beautiful
yard full of fruit trees. I have a shower, a fridge and ample counter space. So,
when I first arrived at site, I will admit I spent some time wondering what I
was doing here. I was here two solid months before I started teaching, without
any friends in the city, rattling around my too-big house, thinking it might
have been a mistake to accept a “non-traditional” Peace Corps site. Most of the
houses in my bairro are even nicer
than mine. Some neighbors have multiple cars; many have guards.
However, it didn’t take long for me to realize that the situation changes
quickly and drastically outside of the city center and my neighborhood. A
10-minute drive to my pedagogical director’s neighborhood and beautiful homes
set in well-groomed quintals are
reached only by dirt roads that were almost impassibly rutted during the rainy
season. A ten-minute walk from my house to my friend Nelo’s home and there aren’t
even roads, only dirt paths connecting one mud-brick house to the next. His
home has no power and not even a pit latrine; the casa de banho is simply a square of dirt outside the house enclosed
by sticks holding up sheets of plastic-wrap. A 15-minute chapa ride out to the preschool founded by a former PCV and most of
the mothers do not even speak Portuguese. Right in the center of town, half the
people you pass on the street are wearing shirts that are full of holes. Many
people have to wear the same two or three shirts they have until they are
literally falling apart.
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| Where the pavement ends down the street from my house |
With a little more time, the veneer of prosperity started to fade off
the rest of the town, too. I started to understand how deep the roots of
poverty go in a country where poor is the rule and rich is the exception. Every
aspect I listed above comes with a caveat, some small, but others quite large. The
roads are paved, but poorly maintained and lined with trash. The municipal
cleaning crew is a gang of women who appear every Wednesday morning to sweep up
the dirt that accumulates roadside with brooms made of dried twigs.
Many of the restaurants only offer a few of the dishes listed on their
menus because the ingredients for the others just aren’t available. Products in
the grocery stores are frequently at or past their expiration date. The stores
in town are stocked with cheap, chintzy Chinese goods and, although there are
dozens of these stores, they all offer the same products. Quality is not
available. Even the “nice” ceramic dishes I bought have manufacturing defects.
Mozambique is where they send the seconds.
When it comes to clothes, most of what is available isn’t just seconds,
but is used. Just outside of town, Mercado
38 is the center of the region’s calamidades,
or used clothing, trade. The market is packed with stalls selling jeans,
t-shirts, jackets, suits, dresses, even shoes, all coming from the closets of
people in the West. I have found that shopping for jeans there is actually
easier than in stores – everything is already broken in! In fact, much of the
clothing is very high quality, more so than the few items of (very expensive)
newly manufactured clothes you can find at the stores in town. The chique girls at school, even the
professors, are wearing secondhand clothing. One of our administrators
regularly wears a nice, light blue, short-sleeved button-down shirt, only the
discreet but distinctive golden-yellow “M” embroidered on the sleeve giving
away that in its first life, it was worn by a McDonald’s manager.
The biggest caveat relates to my school, though. We are big on
technology: rooms full of computers, lessons given with Powerpoint slides, a
lab for the Engenharia Alimentar(food science) program stocked with the equipment for testing, drying, and
packaging food. In the works are both a physics lab and the faculty’s own radio
station for use by the Communications students. But what good is all this
equipment if no one knows how to use it? Another Dutch volunteer working with
the food engineering program just told me that only one professor in the
department knows how to use the tools to test for Ph. Much of the equipment
sits unused.
The truth of the computer lab is that it has taken the place of a
library. We do have a library, but
most books that teachers need for their classes aren’t there. At the beginning
of the year, our director promised that if any teacher needed a book that wasn’t
there, they simply had to request it and it would be ordered. The administrator
asked coordinators for lists of the books their departments required and they
would be procured together. But then nothing happened. I followed up on a few
that I needed for my specific course and was given a vague, “We are working on
it.” They asked for lists again at the end of the semester, but again with no
results. Shortly before the July break, it became clear that due to renovations
and other expenses (including more than 20 new computers for one of the labs),
there just wasn’t money for books.
So, the internet takes the place of textbooks, but not the internet I
had during college. That one included access to academic databases and all
sorts of great (paid) research content. At my school, we just have the vast, un-curated
sprawl of the worldwide web. There is no reference librarian to help the
students find the content they need and they have never been taught research
skills. We do have three IT guys who are great on the technical side of using
computers, but that’s different than knowing how to find the information needed
for a specific discipline. These students have never been taught how to paraphrase,
how to cite or how to analyze sources. Needless to say, this leads to a lot of
plagiarism.
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| My university's library: "Silence. Academics thinking." |
And this is where the depth of poverty here begins to show. The biggest
roadblock in getting the books we need is that they aren’t here in Mozambique.
To obtain them, we will have to contact a bookstore in Maputo that will get in
touch with another in Portugal and have them shipped into the capital city,
from which my school will have to pay to transport them. Seriously. The books
needed for basic courses in Communications, Public Administration, Information
Technology, don’t exist in this country. My city doesn’t even have a bookstore
that could place the order. Even Beira, Mozambique’s second city, doesn’t. We
have to go all the way to the capital to have a chance at getting some, but even
Maputo doesn’t have most of them. That’s what it means to be a poor country: even those with money have to
go abroad to spend it.
Even a school with some financial resources can’t stock its library or
find the staff to run its laboratory. If we do get the radio station up and
running, I have no idea who will be teaching the students how to run it. And
the students who make it to university are the ones living the dream. But, the
technology hides the greater truth of the state of higher education. And that’s
the nuance of poverty within a poor country. Even the students with some means,
even those who came from poverty but worked their way into university, they are
all trapped within a educational system where even when it can provide
technology, can’t necessarily teach them how to use it.
Similarly, no matter how much money you have, your access to quality
healthcare here is limited. As I mentioned, along with the large provincial
hospital, where anyone can receive free care of at times dubious quality, Chimoio
has a handful of private clinics. Peace Corps has vetted them all and cleared
one in particular as the preferred place from PCVs to be treated. The clinic is
probably the cleanest building I have been inside in Mozambique. The staff is
friendly and attentive, as is the Cuban doctor I saw a few months ago. But the
single lab technician only wears gloves sometimes. And when I went in to get
two shots, the nurse administering them came within millimeters of pulling the
hepatitis vaccine into the syringe already pre-loaded with flu vaccine,
stopping only when I saw what was happening and objected in panic-broken
Portuguese. If the shots had been ruined, Peace Corps would have had to courier
another pair up from Maputo, as there weren’t any in Chimoio. During training,
our doctor told the story of a PCV suffering from acute malaria who had to be
medevac’ed to South Africa because there was not a single dialysis machine in
Mozambique. Those in the emerging middle class still don’t have the resources
to access this kind of care.
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| Manica's Provincial Hospital at the Dia dos Trabalhadores parade |
I talked with a Mozambican dentist working at a hospital in Angoche,
Nampula who hated her job. She explained that the hospital didn’t have
equipment for her to do anything other than pull people’s teeth. Although she
had been trained to provide a full range of services, she had been reduced to a
single option: yank it out. PCVs in need of dental care are flown to Maputo to
see the only PC-approved dentist in the country. Expats in Chimoio see a
Zimbabwean who comes into town at times. His trips are announced on a Facebook
page dedicated to expats finding and trading resources and services they can’t
find locally.
My students and colleagues are very aware of the state of health and
education here and know that things are better in the US. It leads to some very
interesting questions that I really struggle to answer. During our first
English class this semester, as a casual diagnostic activity, I opened the floor
to any questions the students wanted to ask me, as long as they were in
English. I expected the usual, “Are you married?” “How many kids do you have?” “Do
you like Mozambique?” and I got a few of those, followed by, “In America, when
you have a president who finishes his time, he leaves. Here in Africa, they
just stay. Look at Robert Mugabe. Why?” Needless to say, I fumbled around for
an answer, eventually mumbling something about accountability and then just
admitting I didn’t know.
In a later class, we got into discussing malaria and another student
asked if we didn’t have mosquitoes in America. I told him that we definitely
did, but that none of them carry malaria now, that we had eradicated it. I
described the coordinated governmental effort and spraying of insecticide. He
listened carefully, paused, and asked, “Well, why can’t we do that in
Mozambique? People here are dying.” Luckily, this was one the other students
could help me out with. It led to an interesting conversation about resources
and political will.
But the most common comments are about education. Students frequently
mention that education in Mozambique is in a bad state. Whenever these
discussions come up, I remind them that development is a process. They know
better than I do that the country is pulling itself out of a deep hole dug by
the segregated education system under colonialism. As I wrote in an earlier blog post, “At independence [in 1975], less than 10% of land was being used to grow
crops, most of the population was illiterate (over 90%), and there were not
even 1,000 indigenous Mozambicans high school graduates. There were 87 doctors
in the country, 6 economists, and 2 agronomists.” The nearly 20-years of civil war that
followed independence didn’t help much. My university was founded as part of
the 1992 peace accords because at the time of the peace negotiations, the only university in the country was
located in Maputo, well out of reach of most Mozambicans in the northern and
central regions of the vast country.
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| A primary school classroom in Dombe, Manica; a secondary school in Manjangue, Gaza; a classroom at my university. |
Thus, Mozambique still struggles to find qualified teachers at the
primary and secondary levels, never mind university professors. But it is a
process and it is getting better. There are many smart, hard-working professors
at my school. Some were educated abroad and came back to put that training to
work here in Moz. My school pursues as many opportunities for partnerships with
institutions that can aid in capacity building as it can. Along with Peace
Corps Volunteers (three of us, all with graduate degrees), there is a Horizon
300 Volunteer with years of experience in food engineering who will work with
that department for at least the next two years. Food engineering also brings
in short term volunteers to give “modules” on specific techniques. We are currently
applying for a partnership with an Austrian university to do some
across-the-board capacity building. At a national level, the school is
partnering with a Dutch program to build an online “blended learning” approach
to teaching English.
I do not mean to imply that this African institution needs to bring in
European or American specialists to tell it what to do; the best universities
in the world continue to form partnerships with other institutions. That’s how
you grow better. These kinds of partnerships will hopefully lead to an
institution that has both the technology and the local know-how to put it to
good use. Hopefully the same will happen for the healthcare system. With
investment from Mozambique and partnerships with those who have the means and
know-how, there is no reason malaria can’t be eradicated and HIV/AIDS can’t be
controlled.
When my students ask about poverty in the US, I try to explain the
difference between being poor within a rich country and living in a poor
country; how in the US most roads are paved, even in poor areas; how most
people have power and running water; where even those living paycheck to
paycheck have access to news and books and information. They may be relegated
to the emergency room at their local hospital, but the care they find there
will probably be competent. Here, the opposite is true: even those with money
may be living on a rutted dirt road, with frequent power outages and poor
sanitation in their community. The education available to their children is
still lacking, even when they can pay for private schools, and they have nearly
no access to books to supplement in-school instruction. The same is true for
healthcare: money can only get you so far if the equipment and know-how simply
don’t exist in your community.
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| The clinic in Dombe Sede |
This is what the fight against poverty is on a national scale. Not just
making sure that the poorest have enough to eat and access to treatment when
they are sick. Although this is important, that isn’t the end of the fight.
Those who are part of the growing middle class need to have access to the
high-quality goods and services that should come with a decent income. Right
now, the “wealth gap” between the middle class and the very wealthy is all the
larger because of this lack on the supply side.
I don’t want to leave the impression that Mozambique is in a hopeless,
desperate position. I only want to convey that sometimes, the physical signs of
development and prosperity can be misleading and obscure a deeper need for
investment in more than just computers and broadband. A sidewalk bustling with
people in well-pressed suits, writing email on smartphones doesn’t necessarily
indicate prosperity. I have students with smartphones (usually cheap Chinese
knock-offs that break easily) who don’t always have breakfast. But these same
students are putting all they have into their educations because they know that
that is the key to a better life. Working with them leaves no doubt in my mind
that Mozambique will continue on its way up. But it also breaks my heart when I
think about how far they would have gone if they had the resources at their
disposal that I had throughout my education. They eat up everything they are
given: devouring books and picking the brains of everyone they meet. And then
they go search out more. They deserve that better life they are working
towards.
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| One of my students presenting his research on evaluation methods at our first Jornada Cientifica |
My next post will be much lighter and full of pictures of the awesome
kids lessons the English Club has started giving!
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| Add caption |
