Finishing up a week or so here in Mozambique – a week of firsts in that it’s my first trip to Mozambique. It was, until last Monday, the only country in southern Africa that I hadn’t been too, and I’ve wanted to see it for years. It is by most measures what I’d heard about it – depending on who you ask it is a country of desperate poverty, where the average life expectancy is 41 years old – and spectacularly beauty, as the white sand islands along the Indian Ocean coastline is as spectacular as any you will find in the world.
I was working this week for a group called Joint Aid Management (JAM), whose foundation has an interesting story. The founder got stuck on what was supposed to be a one-day trip here in 1985 – at the peak of Mozambique’s brutal civil war. When the plane that dropped him off couldn’t return for 10 days, he lived among the refugees in the camp he was visiting, burying, he told me, 30 people a day. The experience impacted him profoundly and he launched JAM as a way to help.
What I saw this week were school feeding programs. Supported by a grant form senators McGovern and Dole in the US, the grant provides two years worth of corn soy blend for schools in the program. The blend is turned into a porridge that provides 75% of the RDA for calories and nutrition for kids, and its used widely in Africa and around the world. By providing meals at schools, JAM is enabling children who would otherwise have had to drop out to work in the fields with the chance to get an education – in my opinion the only real chance Africa has for a better future.
All week I was flying around in a tiny Cessna aircraft that JAM provided. It makes it much easier to cover the massive distances involved here, especially on the bad roads. A plane turns an 8-hour drive into a one-hour flight. All went smoothly until my last landing, here in Maputo yesterday. Just as we touched down a massive tail wind hit the plane and lift the tail off the ground. For a long few seconds we were tilting down the runway on what the pilot said later was one of our three wheels, careening sharply toward the left side of the tarmac. I don’t need that much excitement with 40 days of travel still to go.
August 8th, 2009 | by David in Travel
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All Material © 2008 David Snyder
