My Mozambique story by John Roberts

We walked into the terminal building in Johannesburg to be greeted by a cacophony of vuvuzelas. For a moment - and probably affected by a sleepless 11 ½ hr flight - we were rather overcome by the warmth of our welcome, until it dawned on us that our arrival had just happened to coincide with the start of the 2010 World Cup! South Africa, however, was but the first step on our journey…

… a further hour’s flight over a brown, ochre and only occasionally green landscape saw us descending into Maputo, the capital of our destination – Mozambique. The plane flew low over the 'townships' of the capital, a seemingly endless crush of small houses, separated by impossibly narrow alleys, the only open spaces full of children playing football. The journey from the airport to the city centre enabled us to see these houses from ground level. They didn’t improve on closer inspection.

This was the start of a ten day visit, as together with four other Save the Children companions, I had arrived for a short visit to our programme in Mozambique. Although Mozambique is a member of the Commonwealth, it was in fact a former Portuguese colony, ruled by Portugal for centuries, until it gained independence in 1975. It was then immediately plunged into a bloody conflict that lasted for nearly 2 decades – hardly the start a new country needed.

Today, Mozambique is a stable, multi-party democracy, but whilst the surf and white beaches of its 1600 mile coastline are an increasingly popular destination for tourists, and economic development is at last a reality (albeit a slow one), it remains one of the world’s poorest countries. Excuse the list of statistics, but an average life expectancy of 42 years; ¾ of families living on less than £1 a day; 1 doctor per 25,000 people (1:500 in the UK); four out of 10 children under 5 severely malnourished; a fifth of the country’s children not reaching their 5th birthday, and 1.5 million children are orphaned…. paints the picture.

A visit of this nature is both a privilege, as well as a responsibility. We felt really grateful to have been given the opportunity to undertake the visit – essentially on behalf of all Save the Children volunteers – as well as the responsibility to learn as much as we could about our work in Mozambique, so that we could spread the word as widely as possible on our return.

Save the Children began working in Mozambique in 1984 – helping children and their families affected by the conflict, and helping to rebuild the healthcare system. In 2008 Save the Children UK, Norway and the U.S.A. formally unified their programme in the country.

In 2009, and in partnership with local partners, international organisations and the government, we work in 5 provinces, and directly helped 1.2million children get food, healthcare and education, as well as protecting them from harm and exploitation.

I took 3 pretty basic questions with me to Mozambique: Would I be impressed by our staff; would I be impressed by the projects that we visited; and would I genuinely feel that they were making a real difference to the lives of children and their families? The answers to all 3 questions are actually quite easy – an unequivocal 'yes'!

We were all hugely impressed with the expertise, the commitment and dedication of the staff that we met. They are daily confronted by enormous challenges, long distances to travel, and more problems and situations than they have the resources to respond to as they would wish.

The projects that we visited were equally impressive - tackling the basic problems that affected the daily lives of people in the communities that we visited in the most practical way. Initially resourced by Save the Children but fully involving local people on whose efforts and commitment the future sustainability of the projects depended. From what we saw these qualities were in plentiful supply.

It was great too to see the commitment of volunteers throughout the projects that we visited, which somehow developed a real feeling of connection between us. Like so many Save the Children volunteers in the UK, they shared a belief that what they did was important and was helping to make a real difference.

And was it? I have been asked several times since I returned… "what’s the poverty like ....is it really awful…?" In reality it isn’t. Mozambique is largely populated by people who have very relatively little material resources in their life. They are often forced to focus on survival, and to do the best that they can with what little they have. That said, their hopes and aspirations are very similar to ours – jobs and income security, food security, good health, education and the best possible future for their children, and what Save the Children does is help them to take small but gradual steps towards realising their hopes.

We get things started, they carry them on, and every healthy baby born, or child educated in a newly built or re-furbished school, or every water pump established is a step in this direction.

Maybe best summed up by a woman that we met in Munda. She pushed past her peers to show us her incredibly healthy looking baby, and telling us … "This is because I have been taught [by a Save the Children trained volunteer] how to feed my children properly - thank you."

Save the Children? In Mozambique we certainly do – and this piece is dedicated to everyone who works to achieve that objective.

Download John's full story here.