In Rutanda, the Project

The project I am working on is teaching farm management to and preparing a strategic plan for Mr. Arao Mutova, a farmer who lives in Rutanda, which is in Manica Provence about 6 hours west of Beira, Mozambique. You read that correctly, I am working with one farmer. But it is not as strange as it sounds, given that Mr. Arao (pronounced Uh-Ral) represents approximately 70+ people, including wives (3), children (20) and grandchildren (38) and some son and daughter-in laws, not sure of the number. Six of the adults and Mr. Arao work on the shamba (farm) full time and many of the older children work there when they are not in school. Mr. Arao has a total of 13 hectares and raises mostly maize, dry beans, soybeans, and wheat. He also raises vegetables mostly for family use but also some onions and potatoes for sale. Working with my translator Zacharias we have spent the last 5 days with Mr. Arao gathering information needed to make a strategic plan for the farm including assessing profitability with whole farm budgeting and preparing enterprise budgets as well as assessing the potential for value added products and then see Mr. Arao on Monday morning to give him a verbal presentation of our findings and recommendations before heading back to Beira the same day. We will then get the final document translated into Portuguese and print out English and Portuguese versions. Hopefully we will be finished by noon Wednesday so I have a little time to look around Beira before needing to get to the airport about 11:00 am for the flight to Johannesburg and then on to Atlanta and to Baltimore. Not looking forward to the nearly 17 hour flight from Joburg to Atlanta.

In Rutanda: the logistics

I am in Rutanda and working on the project. Will talk about that in the next post. This post is about the logistics of working in this part of the world. I have a driver whose name I haven't quite figured out and a translator whose name is Zachary. We are all staying at the "Rutanda Lodge." I have a picture of the little round hut with a grass roof which I am staying in. There is a rather primitive shower which delivers cold water only so the workers bring a bucket of hot water in the morning if one wants. The cold shower actually feels pretty good in the afternoon, assuming the workers remembered to run the pump to keep the tank filled up when the electricity was on, which theoretically is on from 6 pm to 10 pm. I think it came on shortly after 6 once. Most of the time it is closer to 7. Part of the problem is that one of the workers goes to get the gasoline for the generator on a bicycle each day. We are not quite sure why the owner hasn't figured out a more efficient system than that but I guess we should be thankful that the power is on at all. Tonight we thought we were out of luck because the man came back on his bicycle and it was clear that he had failed to get any gasoline by the way the containers were bouncing on the bicycle. But there must have been some left in the generator tank because it is after 9 and the power is still on. And they did turn on the pump as soon as the generator started up so the water tank is again full and we are sitting pretty with both power and water. I may take a cold shower before I go to bed just to celebrate. The power situation was particularly complicated for me because the one outlet in my room was not working. So I had to go up to the little dining hut to charge up my computer, cell phone, camera battery, etc. I had to have a triage system to decide which was most critical in terms of battery power left and need. We took a trip today to a larger town a couple of hours away and ran into the owner of the lodge while we were there. Zachary filled him in on some of the problems we were having and lo and behold when the power came on this evening my outlet was fixed. So maybe some things will be better. We will see.

In Beira

Okay I am in Beira. The flight from Johannesburg to Beira was pretty uneventful. We were above the white fluffy clouds and could see the ground most of the way. I will try my hand at uploading two of the pictures I took from the plane. Tomorrow we head out to Rutanda at 7 am.

Ready to Go

Waiting at the BWI for the flight to Atlanta and then on to Johannesburg South Africa and Beira Mozambique. This is the same trip which got postponed because of the sudden illness and death of my mother in October. So I am kind of dedicating this trip to her memory.

Welcome to my Mozambique 2014 blog. I will be leaving for Mozambique on Saturday, October 18 and returning Tuesday November 4. My assignment this time is to work on farm business management with farmers in west central Mozambique. The assignment is with CNFA and part of the USAID Farmer to Farmer Program. I will be posting to the blog as I am able. I anticipate connectivity to be a little sporadic but hopefully good enough so that I can post some pictures every few days if not every day. My flight itinerary is to fly from Baltimore to Atlanta to Johannesburg and then on to Beira, Mozambique.