Continuing the work in Finland

Today I and our supervisor Timo met with Mariko and Perttu for the first time since they got back to Finland from Mozambique. We talked about the outcomes of their travel and with the objective to discuss the focus for the continuing work. It was very interesting to hear about all the work that they had been able to do and how many people they've come in contact with. I was impressed by their work and glad to hear that they had found some helpful people there! 

The locals find that there is a problem with the waste management that also causes trouble for the sanitary system. For example there is a dike that is supposed to transport excess water to a nearby river but that gets clogged by waste.

A possible focus could be dry toilets (huussi) even though many locals expressed the difficulty with lack of space where you could use the compost that is created in such a set-up. A possible place to make a dry toilet pilot plant could be at a school. In an educational environment a dry toilet could help develop up the understanding for nature and ecosystems, in addition to fulfilling the need for a toilet.

Hopefully we will find a useful focus area that can suggest a solution to or ease some of these sanitary problems. Let us continue the work!

The culture shock: eniten vituttaa kaikki

We’re leaving Maputo this morning, and unfortunately I spent most of the last days being extremely annoyed about everything.

Biggest of all is the position of women. You always see women carrying around heavy loads on their heads and babies on their backs or sitting next to a table or on the ground with different things to sell – men seem to be just hanging around, usually drinking beer. Though it’s always men trying to sell you the tourist crap everywhere in the city. There are no women working for ASSCODECHA, except in the kitchen. There was one girl participating our hackathon. The men make jokes about Chamanculo having so many more women than men that men can just sleep with whoever they want until they’re 50 and then choose a 20-year-old girl to carry them food. There are stories of men who have 50 children, all with different women. The 20-year-old girls taking the English course I held all had children, but most of them lived with their parents and didn’t have boyfriends, let alone husbands. Not many seemed to be married, and in their language being married and living together are kind of the same thing, so not many have any security provided by laws concerning supporting them or the children.

At first I used to wear the same clothes as I would wear in Finland during the summer – shorts reaching mid-thigh. Everybody staring made me so uncomfortable that I stopped and started to wear men’s shorts Perttu bought from a market but found them a bit too tight for himself later. It didn’t make much of difference though. I’m so fed up with men yelling at us at the streets and thinking that it’s ok to touch us.  “How are you doing, baby girl?”, “Hey, give me one of the women!”, “Ask if she’d like some black man!”. Whenever talking to someone, they immediately enquire if I have children and cannot comprehend why I don’t.  The men are mostly interested in talking with men. When we went out one night to Chamanculo, there was one single other woman near the bar, everyone else was men.

It’s normal here to have somebody to do your laundry, and most of us have had something washed here. However there is one thing that they don’t wash – women’s underwear. They are always returned separately, unwashed. No trouble with men’s underwear, though. What the hell? Are women more filthy than men?

Girls here believe that white men are their ticket to a happy life. White men don’t hit and they participate in the housework.

Then there’s the racism. Everything costs more, because we’re white. We visited the Inhaca Island last weekend and we had rented a house through a local. When the owner of the house found out that we were white, he wanted to charge us 50% more, even though the price was agreed on earlier. We left there after the first night and went to a hostel.

The standards are unbelievable. We’re staying at the best hostel in town, and we have bed bugs (despite regular poisonings), rats and for a week the owners dog barking outside the window through the night so that we couldn’t sleep. One of the other dogs regularly pees on the bathroom floor. There are no lockers and the doors can’t be locked. No wifi either. There is only one electric slot per room, so we’ve had to buy an extension cord to get our electronics charged. The atmosphere is nice though, and nothing has been taken from the rooms even though they are unlocked.

Maputo is located at the sea, and the seafood is supposed to be abundant. They still ship most of the stuff frozen from Angola, and everything is extremely overcooked. The food is the same in every restaurant (unless you choose a different cuisine like Indian or Chinese): a piece of overcooked protein (fish, prawns, chicken or beef), overcooked rice and chips. As it’s quite evident that the food has not been in the cold or otherwise properly handled before cooking, we’re actually quite happy for that.

Then there’s everyone trying to constantly rip you off, unbelievable noise level and heat, dangerous infrastructure for pedestrians (and everything else), agreed times or other things meaning nothing, the yes men who’ll answer yes to everything even if they don’t have clue (“To Costa De Sol, do you know where that is?”, “Is this machine-washable?”, “Can we have tables for the hackathon?”), lousy service, opportunistic stealing, corruption, violence and so on. The police are the most dangerous people to run into.

All that being said we’ve had an excellent time here and people are very welcoming and happy. We’ve also had some nice food prepared with love. The locals take care of us, the coffee is good and sun’s always shining. There are nowhere near as much mosquitoes as in Finland. Everyone dresses very nicely and clothes are washed every day, even in the slum. We have 24-hour guarding at our hostel, and most children return things that have been given to them. Bigger children take care of smaller ones and carry the smallest ones around, and they hardly ever cry.

Culture shock is something that practically everyone faces at some stage when getting to know a new culture. It is important to recognize it, as it’s just a phase. Sometimes a good night’s sleep, a good meal and a smile is all that it takes to get over the worst part of it.

Continuing the project with ASSCODECHA

On Friday we discussed with Amandio and Zeca about the continuation of our SGT project. I was curious how the discussions with Jaana some years back had gone and what kind of hopes they had of our project; would the dry sanitation be the way to go or did they wish we’d take another direction altogether.

Amandio and Zeca knew dry toilets as ecological latrines. First we talked about the space issue. ASSCODECHA works with the least fortunate families that have the least space. Some don’t even have space for a traditional latrine – they excrete in a plastic bag and throw that away somewhere. And even those who just have space for a latrine wouldn’t have space for a garden where they could utilize the compost. They did admit though that many people probably don’t know about space effective urban gardening techniques. They still had doubts about whether selling the compost or the produced vegetables would have a significant effect in their income. They also didn’t believe that dumping the sewage waste is a big issue here, but they did admit that when it floods after rain, people sometimes take advantage of that and open their latrine holes to empty them. The very reason for cholera epidemics here every summer. 

They also knew that in other neighborhoods there are a few NGOs working with dry sanitation and urban gardening. Those projects are still in implementing phase and so far they have only worked with families that already have areas for gardening, so they didn’t have much to say about that.

ASSCODECHA had previously worked with the World Food Program, where they gave out food. After that they thought that it’d be better to teach people to grow their own food and they had some discussions with organizations that have more experience on that, but they didn’t manage to start a cooperation and a project was never started. 

They said that they had nothing against a dry sanitation project, but believed it to be challenging. Zeca said that he had liked our idea about working with the schools. ASSCODECHA has a previous relationship eith the minucipality, and they could lobby for piloting dry toilets in a school that has a bad sanitation situation. Schools would also have space for proper gardens. If the children learned to use these latrines at school and ASSCODECHA would provide education material (simple contents, they reminded), it might be possible to create a demand for dry toilets. Therefore we agreed that we’ll continue research when we get back to Finland, and they can take our ideas forward with the municipality.

We made some posters with info about dry toilets and prepared a questionnaire to find out about people’s feelings towards them, but unfortunately the participants of our festival today were mainly children. We might have to leave the questionnaire for ASSCODECHA to do later in order to get more than a couple answers.

The primary school, World Bank and plans for Chamanculo

The last day of the hackathon was quite busy for all of us – the non-SGT members of our group all had one hackathon team to coach and they had the last chance to support their groups to create the pitches that would bring out the full potential of their ideas to the jury. Marja-Reetta Paaso from STIFIMO, Jean Barroca from the World Bank and the local representative of Chamanculo in Maputo municipality governance judged the ideas 5 teams had formed during the past four days. The winners were rewarded with laptops.

Meanwhile we visited a local primary school and did a few interviews.

At the school it took a while to get permission to see the grounds and film there. We waited outside with probably close to a hundred children gathered around us and trying to touch us, especially our hair, and to hold our hands. We were somewhat positively surprised about the school’s facilities after visiting some homes. There was a lot of space, light classrooms with big blackboards and well-behaving kids. The toilets were quite good flushable crouch latrines, except for the lack of cleaning. The kids drank water straight from the tap as they do everywhere, even though it’s not safe. The kids tried to stop us from going into the latrines and were holding their nose as we visited there. It was smelly but it could’ve been worse. Later the school’s director told that the latrines were not cleaned at all – they couldn’t afford it.

The classes had over 50 children, but they were quiet and obeyed the teachers – perhaps due to the sticks the teachers had in their hands. All children didn’t have a school uniform as they couldn’t afford it, but they were still allowed to be there. We didn’t see books but the kids had notebooks and pens. At the school there was a little kiosk canteen where the kids could buy food, but most of them carried a lunch with them to school: mostly popcorn. There was also a small library, but we didn’t take a closer look at that. A teacher that we interviewed seemed very nice and professional. There was also a small cornfield on the grounds. 

Visiting a school in Chamanculo

We also had a chance to talk to the school’s director. There were well over 1000 children going to that school in three shifts during the day. He said that not all the kids around the area come, but there are NGOs that  go around and try to collect everyone. The school also meets with the parents. The school went until 7^th grade, after which the kids could go to a secondary school, but they had to pay for that. The director claimed that many kids continue there. He also thought that Mozambique’s education system was perfect and that he wouldn’t change a thing – did he really think that or did he just say it for being scared of something, is hard to say.

Later we talked to the local representative of Chamanculo. He is elected in a way that the locals can affect – whether it’s a simple vote I’m not sure. He was very proud of Chamanculo, and said that he could even claim that Chamanculo is the capital of Mozambique instead of Maputo. All important people have lived her or have otherwise connections to here. Also he thought that people here have a strong identity of being from Chamanculo and there is a real feeling of a community, which Maputo city doesn’t have. He told that there are plans of urbanizing Chamanculo, and already many things are going forward, for example making land ownership official for the residents. They will build proper roads and ditches and give people real addresses sometime in the future. There are however no plans of building a proper sewage system. They are going to start piloting a service that would collect people’s sewage waste from their toilets manually. Of this I talked more with Orlando, who is working with this project for the World Bank. 

Orlando explained that they are providing companies with a safe manually operated technology to empty the sludge from the latrines, also the traditional latrines and the ones that are located so that they cannot be emptied with a truck. The pilot in Chamanculo should start very soon. He said that he didn’t believe that people would have space to dig new holes, so they would have to empty the current holes, and often that is done in a not very safe of hygienic way. Then the waste is poured into ditches at night – as the man living by the ditch complained a few days ago. So far most people have been able to dig new holes though, as there is only that one ditch in this part of Chamanculo and they don’t dump the waste on the streets. Of course people would have to pay for the service, and it’ll mainly help the “middle class” of Chamanculo. He didn’t believe that dry toilets would work here because of the lack of space.

We also talked to Jean Barroca from the World Bank. He is a consultant and doesn’t live here. He’s in Maputo to develop a participatory monitoring system for solid waste management of, where people could report for example of a missing waste container  by sending a free SMS. He didn’t have too much to say about Mozambique as he’d only been here for a little while. He did say though that in a country like this where lack of trust is an issue, the World Bank is often able to bring together different actors, such as the government, municipality and private sector that otherwise wouldn’t cooperate very well. On Monday he gave a very interesting lecture where he introduced different mobile utilizing solutions for different issues around the world. He also said that according to the UN Habitat, one third of the world’s population is going to live in informal settlements by 2020. This will have major socio-economic and environmental implications. Informal settlements are often high risk sites due to for example flooding and health issues that are present in Chamanculo too.

Interview with Jaana: dry sanitation

As we were going to present the dry toilet (huussi) solution combined with urban gardening as an example for the hackathon teams, on Wednesday we interviewed Jaana Oikarinen, who currently lives here and has been a volunteer for ASSCODECHA, but before that  worked in Swaziland with a dry sanitation project and wrote her thesis about the home gardens in Msunduza. The project was a cooperation between Huussi ry, the salvation army of Swaziland and the Mbabane municipality and was funded by the foreign ministry of Finland. The project included dry sanitation, organic gardening and environmental education.

When Jaana joined the project, it had already been going on for some years. What she saw was not a great success – some dry toilets were not ready or they were locked in public places. There were big administration problems and lack of education. People didn’t know how to use their dry toilets and used them as a storage instead. Jaana never saw any full toilets, so she couldn’t witness the composting and utilizing the product. She actually only saw one toilet in active use, and that belonged to a person who had a big garden and was very interested in the functioning mechanisms.

Interview with Jaana Oikarinen at ASSCODECHA

In the project they built three different kinds of dry toilets. One model was a ready package from a South-African company, and as people had not participated in the planning and building process they didn’t know how to use it. This model didn’t need any dry substance such as sawdust added after use due to some chemical that came with it. Instead it was very important to use toilet paper, which people didn’t as they couldn’t afford it. Probably they couldn’t afford to buy the additional chemical after a while either. The final project of this kind of toilet was supposed to be sand.  The other two toilets were built of local materials on the spot. In one case children got into the compost tank and broke the toilet.

Jaana thought that the internal communication with the project was not sufficient and that they should not have started with the building of the toilets. Instead people would’ve needed to be educated first and the demand should’ve been created. There had also been some talk about building a toilet of local scrap material, but that pilot was never realized. Jaana told that a similar dry sanitation project in Zambia had been more successful, mostly because it happened at a rural area instead of a slum.

Jaana had also discussed with the ASSCODECHA about trying out dry toilets here in Chamanculo. However they had thought that Chamanculo is too densily populated, and dry toilet, possible extra compost and garden need space. In Chamanculo people very rarely have a garden, whereas in Swaziland many people have gardens at home and schools have their own big gardens too, along with animals like chickens. Here some schools have small gardens, but it’s not possible to utilize them in teaching – the schools have too many children. So many, that they go to school in three turns. So here the transportation of compost could create problems. There might also be participation challenges, as people don’t really see the need to recycle energy, or anything else for that matter.

Jaana still thought that there would be possibilities of having school gardens, community gardens and home gardens, but people are probably not aware of space-efficient techniques like vertical gardens.  Here people don’t suffer too much hunger, but there is a lot of malnutrition due to diet consisting mainly of starch (bread, chips).  Around Chamanculo it’s easy to spot children with bloated stomachs.

In Jaana’s opinion schools might be better places to start with dry sanitation projects – many schools don’t have hygienic toilets, often due to lack of maintenance. She thought that ASSCODECHA should lobby for better maintenance. Often children don’t even want to go in the toilets.

Interview with Teemu: the society

Past days have been hectic and full of interviews, as were leaving Maputo on Monday and have little time left to gather information here.

On Tuesday we interviewed Teemu Seppälä, who is a senior expert in the Ministry of Science and Technology and is working in the STIFIMO project, with a mission to build an innovation ecosystem between the universities, the private sector and the public sector. They have been organizing for example a nationwide business plan competition, workshops, innovation and coworking spaces (like Design Factory or Startup Sauna at Aalto University) and hackathons. The Chamanculo hackathon they organized with us is the fourth one and their first community involving case. Their hackathon group has over 500 members already.

Teemu has been doing business in over 40 countries, so we were interested in how Mozambique in his opinion functions in relation to other counties. Teemu said that he finds Mozambique the most corrupted country in the world and gave several examples of unsuccessful international projects where the money had not gone where it was supposed to go. According to him many development cooperation projects with Mozambique have in fact been lately cancelled due to the problems with the use of the given funds. He also said that in no other country he had encountered such a lack of respect from the government. He did admit though that the situation is now better as he has gained some trust, and named the lack of trust another big issue. He said that the concept of responsibility doesn’t exist here – nobody is taking it but not really expecting anyone else to take it either. There is also a lack of leadership and knowledge.

In Mozambique politics and governance can no longer be separated, and the police, army and officials are all part of Frelimo. Frelimo used to be a communist party, but nowadays Mozambique is tightly government-led capitalistic country. The society is very authoritarian, and according to Teemu the president tells his ministers what to do, who in turn tell the parliament what to do. All the ministries are quite isolated, and don’t cooperate or know of each other very well. 

The income gap between the rich and the poor is all the time growing in Mozambique. There is practically no middle class, some people are just a bit less poor than others. The price level of the country is quite insane compared to most people’s income. The apartments in the city cost in some places as much as in Helsinki and in other places as much as in Manhattan. Even Chamanculo is not a cheap place to live if you don’t own the land – apparently there are companies that buy people’s houses and land and then rent it back to them. Most of the food is imported from South-Africa, and the local agriculture is suffering. In industrial scale there are only few things like sugar, bananas and nuts produced. The importing of food is a very good business for Frelimo. The prices of the foods at the supermarket are similar to Finland, and for example milk and cheese cost a lot more here than in Finland. Still the minimum wage here is 50 euros a month, and a doctor earns about 350€ per month. Everybody has multiple jobs, so they can’t really focus on anything. For example teachers don’t really have time to do their job well. For primary school teachers don’t even have an incentive to do their job well, as they usually also after school give extra support lessons  that need to be paid for.

Teemu also pointed out something that we have also noticed: people live very strongly in the present moment and don’t think about the future. This is very evident when discussing with people. They live like they could die any day. One example is that they cannot even by more phone credit than 20 meticals (50 cents) at once because they’ll use it up straight away if they get more, even though getting more at once is a lot better deal.

Teemu still believed that changes can happen and that for example ASSCODECHA could very well succeed in making some small changes in the Chamanculo situation through lobbying.  The situation with Chamanculo is actually quite interesting, as almost every politician has lived there or has close connections there – for example the current president and many ministers are from Chamanculo. He believed in leading by example. He suggested that in our project we will think about some small practical solutions that people can make themselves and make a difference in their everyday life. He didn’t believe that people would be ready to pay for practically anything but food and water.