Two weeks ago, I was visiting some of ASVIMO’s beneficiaries with Maya, one of our activistas. Maya was very patient and translated the conversations he was having for me (most of our beneficiaries speak only Sena, the local dialect) and also translated any questions I had. Of the twelve families we visited, nine complained of being hungry.
After our visit, I asked Maya if he thought we should increase the amount of food each of our beneficiaries receives (each families that is visited by our activistas receives a monthly food subsidy, a program run through ASVIMO with the help of the World Food Program). Maya responded that maybe we should increase the amount each person gets, but what is more important is that the food is delivered each month.
Someone went on vacation in January, and no one in Dondo received any food.
ASVIMO provides food to over 2,000 people in the District of Dondo. In January, those 6,000 people did not receive anything. On the 25th of January, a truck from the World Food Program (WFP) showed up at our office. The truck was stacked with food for the months of both January and February, and the representative from the WFP apologized for not having come earlier. Though it would be a huge undertaking for us to organize food for two months, the representative really should have apologized to our beneficiaries who had been hungry all month.
With hundreds of 50 kg bags of beans and corn (which will be pounded, usually by hand, by women into a powder and then used to make xima, a filling rice substitute), I helped the activistas organize for the distribution last week.
I never thought I would say this, but I miss Microsoft Excel.
Each beneficiary is registered by our activistas on a list. Some activistas keep this list fairly organized in a notebook or folder and others have five or six sheets of paper with hundreds of names written haphazardly with numbers next to them signifying ages and family members.
Somehow, these lists all had to be transferred onto an official document that would be turned in both to the Mozambican Social Services and to the WFP. This document, mind you, is only as official as the emblem in the upper left hand corner. It is just a word document with a table that requires you to manually insert each name, the amount of food to be received, and the date it will be received. There was no automatic numbering system, no alphabetizing of names to make the process of distribution easier, no sum function to easily report back to the WFP how much we had leftover or still needed to receive.
I could have easily copied the emblem onto a new document and done the whole thing in excel, but that would not be very sustainable. Plus, I would have to interpret the previously mentioned sheets of names, and I would certainly make every Dominga a Domingo and assume Joao Jose is a complete name though his full name is truly Joao Jose Jose, son of Joao Jose.
Since Monday, I have been sitting with each activista, typing in each name of beneficiaries as the activista makes a card by hand which will be given to the beneficiary and serve as a kind of receipt. With one flash drive (I tried putting my bosses flash drive in my computer and was immediately met with seizure on the part of my computer), one other person who knows how to type, and thousands of names, I have spent the entire week helping to create these documents.
On Wednesday morning, I joined my co-workers in our large gazebo (at our office, we have this covered gazebo-like building which is where I spend most of my workdays), which had been turned into a food distribution site. Three neighborhoods worth of beneficiaries sat in the shade nearby, and waited for us to be ready to give them their food. First, people came to my table, with the handwritten cards we had made during the previous week. I found their name on the database list and had them sign that they received their food (for most people, this meant a thumb print, but for the people who could write, it was really fun to see how excited they were to write their name, especially older women, a demographic of which few can write, being able to write was clearly a source of pride). After they had “signed,” the beneficiaries went to George, one of the boys who works at ASVIMO, was standing in the center of about 100 of the 50 kg bags of corn, about a foot of corn on the ground below him, with a bucket that with each scoop into the sea of corn gave the beneficiary 5 kgs. Tio Nhemba (who now I understand his name, nhemba is the local term for red beans) was the man of the hour, measuring out beans on our brand new scale and then giving them to our patient beneficiaries. Each child receiving food got 15 kg of corn and 2 kg of beans. Each “doente” (sick person) received 75 kg of corn and 15 kg of beans. Some people came prepared with bikes (rare) or wheelbarrows (very rare), but most people hoisted their provisions on their head and walked home. It should be reiterated here that people were coming to our location from three neighborhoods in Dondo, a fairly spread out town. Some people were carrying 50 kg bags of corn on their heads for close to 15 miles!
After three days of distribution, we were excited to be done. George was covered in “poera” (corn dust) and exhausted, the woman who sells popsicles near our office was out, and I had been given more mangos than I knew what to do with (older doentes, especially women tend to arrive with gifts, and this time of year, these gifts are in the form of mangos).
Though it was exhausting work, it was well worth it when you saw how thankful people were to be receiving food. Older women would take my hand and say how glad they were that I was there helping out (this is my own interpretation, most of them speak only Sena and I am only just learning, they could have been saying I was a total moron and smell like Beira), then they would wrap their beans in their capulana, put the satchel on their head, and march home.
Next month they will be back, and they will be just as happy to wait in the shade all day as I interpret our activistas handwriting.
