Setting up the Office…

Setting up the office


The Office in Mutarara

The previous use of the building was a dance hall. I could almost understand when they spent half a day covering up the wall pictures of bottles of beer but I was lost on the point when management covered up the hand painted pictures of couples dancing. A bit OTT!


Where do I work…
Mozambique is north of South Africa, east of Zimbabwe and south of Malawi and Tanzinia.

Map of Mozambique


Map of Mutara District
Our base office in Muturara Sede (Muturara Central).

People I Work With

Jean-Claude Mukadi
Zambezi Relief Program Director


Phillippe (from another agency) and Liz Satow - Program Officer
Philippe is a riot to talk to with his own energy and humour overlain with a heavy French accent (he is Belgian), . Everything is alive and intense when he talks about it. One of his best stories was in Somalia, his organisation could not get him any fuel. He had to keep the vehicles running so every night, for the good of humanity, he and a colleague would go out into the streets at siphon petrol from the local residents cars.

Innocencio
In the brief time we worked together we seamed to form a pretty natural friendship. If we had gone to school together I am sure we would have been great mates. Innocencio is starting his own church “Living Development”. He has practical programs as well as spiritual programs. I expect it is a bit of a hell fire and brim stone message but I did not get to hear him formally preach.

George.
George was the waiter at the hotel. From what we learnt he was basically a slave (or had been). He was not paid for his first two years of employment. He slept on a mat generally under the stars. If it rained he came into the porch. He was really humble, smiled a lot and did not appear to complain. He was a ‘happy’ alcoholic if there is such a thing. Based on his private history there was no purpose or means to saving money for the future. So any tips he got went into beer. Again, the most humble man I am aware of.




Joel (Food Program)


Bonifacio - Child Friendly Spaces


Florinda (Finance) and Laura (Office Manager)
Laura held the office together and was a multi-tasker extraordinaire.

Joseph Kumara (National Relief Director) and Jean-Claude

WASH Cluster Meetings…

The size of the 2002 tsunami overwhelmed the agencies. With 1300 non-governmental agencies in the Indonesian response there was a lot of chaos just working out who was who and who was doing what. An outcome was that the UN has set up sector clusters to give better coordination in relief responses. The Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) cluster is headed by UNICEF.

First thing off the plane in Maputo I am into a national level WASH coordination meeting. I did not have any information on the situation where we were working nor of any of our progress to date. I took a bit of heat on behalf of my organisation about insufficient situational knowledge and apparent lack of progress. I don’t know that 14 years of process engineering has provided me with too many practical skills for WatSan field work but it has given me a thicker skin and the knowledge that in meetings it is better to say little and have people think you no nothing than to speak out and have people know you no nothing. I was able to repeatedly say “I do not yet have the information but will get back to when I do have the info” which was the right way. After a while the heat cooled of and I had not taken on any promises that I could not deliver and nobody was lead astray. A full on meeting though!

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Arriving in Mozambique

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Photo 1: Driving in Maputo (Moz's capital city) from the airport.

A Call from Africa

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Starting December 2006 the Zambezi valley experienced flooding displacing people from low lying lands adjacent to the river. The people have congregated on higher land resulting in new accommodation centres and additional population in existing centres. We have been monitoring the situation and in late February decided that water and sanitation assistance was required in addition to the food, shelter, health, and non-food item distribution we were providing.
Photo: My first ever sighting of Africa