A Vida Gostosa
Our second day started a little slower, the accumulated exhaustion from the journey to Maputo and a heavy first day of meetings and preparations for the meetings took a toll. We began the day by making calls to different cooperation agencies to try to get meetings in order to further inform ourselves about the NGO landscape and the role being undertaken by the different missions. This was a recommendation of both Alexia and Stefano, respectively the heads of Fundação Khanimambo and the Italian Cooperation Agency.
The first move of the day was to go to speak to Thäis Gonzalez, from the Spanish Cooperation Agency (AECID), whom unfortunately was caught up in a “ministerial situation” and could only make it towards the end of the meeting. In any case, we agreed to meet again next week and for the short 15 minutes that we engaged in conversation, huge insight and knowledge was obtained. She explained the vision that the AECID has, and where they allocate resources; and we discussed a little about how these align with InAGlobe’s involvement in development. After the meeting with AECID, we met with Muheti, our right hand in Mozambique, and made our way to medicusmundi mediterrània, a primary healthcare focused NGO that has an extremely data driven approach, basing its decisions largely on investigations and studies. This approach to development is of extreme interest to us because the large amounts of data and a comprehensive approach to understanding the situation has potential for countless number of engineering based projects. We agreed to keep close contact over the following months so that once InAGlobe is structured and built we can engage in giving students the opportunity to form part of Medicus Mundi’s initiatives.
Following our meeting, Muheti gave us an amazing tour of Maputo, a city that until now had been a mystery. We visited the “NO-GO ZONE”, a promenade on the sea front decorated with art student mosaics that had picked up a reputation out of a series of articles that may or may not have been validated. We had lunch on the sea front, passing by several of the re-activation projects that are being constructed, including the new fabulous American Embassy. Then we went to the City Hall, right after obtaining some Malarone that a friend of ours had left at her hotel, which took 30 minutes to find after the receptionist misplaced it. The City Hall was a beautiful colonial building which had actually closed a few minutes before we arrived, but Muheti’s smooth talk managed to get us into the foyer to see the inside for a few minutes.
That evening we experienced a bit of a complication with our accommodation for the weekend. Initially our plan had been to go to Inhaca, to enjoy the beach and the sun for a couple days, but after an increase in workload and a great plan for the weekend proposed by Muheti we decided to give the weekend in Maputo a chance. This in turn left us without a place to stay for the weekend. In any case, we left it as work for the next day, and we headed off to dinner and a concert in the Centro Cultural Franco-Moçambicano, where Timbila Mazimba, a band from Inhambane, was celebrating their 20 years. The concert was an incredible experience for all of us, the mixture of percussion, vocals, guitars and electric, high-paced dancing. Before dinner we came across a police patrol, they stopped us, requested our documents and then decided to nit-pick in search of a bribe. Muheti, a man a with a strong code did not want this behaviour to even be implied, he managed to get us all away with nothing more than a bit of a lecture on “how they are protecting us”. Despite this incident, the night turned out to be absolutely fascinating, living the Mozambican night with a pair of Mozambican nationals was a great experience.
