The depth of poverty in the HDI's #185

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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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