Bem-vindo a Maputo

Disclaimer: Due to my limited access to the Internet, especially outside of the capital, all blog posts from Mozambique are being uploaded after my return to the States based on the dates and content of the journal I am keeping during my time here.

Greetings from Mozambique! The rest of the team does not arrive until tomorrow, so I spent my first day in Maputo exploring the city on foot. Starting near the Central Hospital, I walked around in circles for a bit before heading west to the city center, south to the docks, and then back northeast, which in total took about three hours.

First impressions:

• Maputo International Airport, though small, is fairly clean and modern.
• Prices in the capital are higher than what I had anticipated for a country whose GDP per capita is $428 USD–my 30-minute from the cab ride cost 500 meticais ($18), which I confirmed is about the standard rate, and a lunch of corn porridge, beans, and mystery meat set me back 300 meticais.
• On a somewhat related note, poverty is not as apparently prevalent in Maputo as I imagined.
• The winter weather here is beautiful.
• Never before in my life have I felt so foreign (more on this later). 
• Many of the main avenues are named after Communist leaders: Av. Karl Marx, Av. Vladimir Lenine, Av. Mao Tse Tung, Av. Ho Chi Min, Av. Kim Il Sung

Maputo International Airport

View from my modest accommodations near the Central Hospital

Masjid Taqwa mesquita (mosque)

Downtown Maputo streetscape - Avenida 24 de Julho

Maputo Cathedral

Praça da Independência

Municipal Council Building

Jardim Tunduru

Abandoned colonial-era buildings

Market

Market, cont.

Jumma Masjid mosque

Across Avenida 25 de Setembro

Street signs

"Teatro Scala"

Avenida Samora Machel

National Library

Ministry of Industry and Energy, Central Post Office

By around 6 pm it was becoming too dark to walk through the sketchy park that curves around Av. Patrice Lumumba, so I decided to call it a day and stepped into an Asian-looking establishment, hoping that the familiarity of rice and hot soup might settle my stomach (which was still reeling from the mystery meat). I sat down, started reading the menu, and spotted an item described as "uma bacia de arroz com vegetais com carne em cima," which I realized was describing bibimbap. Yes, believe it or not, my first night in Maputo, I had somehow found my way to probably the only Korean restaurant in the country, where I splurged on 돌솥비빔밥. The gochujang tasted a bit odd, and I'm still annoyed that they charged me an extra 200 meticais for kimchi, but hey, neither beggars nor disoriented Korean-Texan travelers in remote southeast African countries can be choosers.

Jeonju, I owe you big time.

República de Moçambique

Capital: Maputo

Population: 22,948,858

Area: 309,496 sq mi (about the size of Turkey, or almost twice the size of California)

Government: Presidential republic

Primary religions: Catholic 28.4%, Muslim 17.9%, Zionist Christian 15.5%

Languages: Portuguese (official), Emakhuwa, Xichangana, Cisena, Elomwe, others

GDP per capita: $428

Life expectancy: 51.8 years

Literacy: 47.8%

And a few notes from the CultureGrams file provided by Yale's travel clinic:

The family is considered society's most valuable institution. Parents frequently refer to their children as "my first fortune," "my second fortune," and so on.

Married women usually wear a capulana (wraparound skirt) tied about the waist and a head scarf. In the northern region, a man who cannot provide his wife with at least one capulana each year is not considered deserving of her respect.

When northern men and women meet each other, they clap hands three times before saying "Moni" (Hello).

Men who practice polygamy are supposed to provide a separate hut for each wife and her children. In many cases, several wives will have their houses close together and will share household duties.

It is culturally acceptable for married men to have girlfriends.

More than 80 percent of Mozambicans are engaged in agriculture, especially farming and herding cattle.

The currency is the metical, a name derived from a gold measure used by Arabs before the colonial era.

Schooling is not mandatory. While two-thirds of eligible children enroll in elementary schooll, less than 10 percent pass to the secondary level.

More than half the population has no access to clean drinking water.

Mozambique has one of the world's highest rates of HIV infection: 13 percent of adults aged 15 to 49.

Above is the full extent of my knowledge of Mozambique...
Just one more flight until I'm finally there!

Millennium Maize Mills

For those of you wondering why I'm currently on my way to rural northern Mozambique, below is the project proposal my team members and I submitted to the Jackson Institute in April:

After Mozambique's independence in 1975 from nearly five centuries of Portuguese rule, the country's development continued to be hindered by large-scale emigration, drought, and a brutal civil war that lasted until 1992. Within this difficult environment, a social enterprise known as TechnoServe has spent decades creating business solutions to poverty, stimulating the economy from the bottom up. Their list of successful projects includes a program to revitalize the nation's cashew nut industry, once the nation's largest, as well as a thriving domestic poultry venture, which have provided livelihoods to thousands of Mozambicans across the country.

For our capstone seminar thesis in the International Studies program, we will be writing a case study on the efforts of TechnoServe in one of their most recent venture, the Millennium Maize Mills project, which aims to capitalize on Mozambique’s potential to become a regional grain belt within southern Africa. Maize is the primary staple crop of the country, with 1.6 million tons of annual demand and a 9% growth rate. Recognizing the social and economic importance of maize in the country, TechnoServe has launched Millennium Maize Mills to promote the development of maize mills in the context of TechnoServe’s vision for long-term, sustainable transformation of human health and food systems in northern Mozambique. The primary objectives of MMM are to:

• Provide stable income-generating opportunities for local entrepreneurs
• Develop the processing component of the existing grains value chain
• Make a positive impact on the economics of gender equity
• Partner with NGOs, the government and private-sector companies to improve health and nutrition using the mill as the central facilitation point.

Our team is seeking to fully capture the intricacies of this project, including the ways in which it has progressed to its current state, possible challenges and sources of conflict during the program’s development, and its potential for future growth and expansion. To this end, our group plans to conduct research and on-site interviews during the month of August with the help of key contacts in Maputo and Nampula.

During the first week, we will visit TechnoServe's country headquarters in Maputo to learn about the organization’s operations and administrative structure. In particular, we hope to gain a deeper understanding of the business models used for their current projects and explore opportunities to speak to other key contacts in the area. This should focus our attention on the key issues surrounding the Millennium Maize Mills and will be central to planning out further activities as we visit the Nampula office and local maize mills in the following weeks.

Our remaining two weeks will be spent in the northern province of Nampula, where we will visit TechnoServe's pilot mill site as well as other existing mills in the area. We will conduct extensive interviews of the operators of the mills as well as the women who frequent them to gain further insight into key considerations of the project. During our third and final week, we will shift our attention to the experiences and expertise of TechnoServe employees involved with the venture. During this time, we will discuss the future of the project, especially in terms of potential scaling and expansion opportunities throughout the region in coming years.

Throughout our research, we will also seek to contribute to TechnoServe's mission by providing a detailed analysis of our findings, helping them document their work, raising pertinent questions, and supporting their efforts to move into the full implementation phase of the project. Furthermore, we hope that the case study we write will add meaningfully to the growing literature on social entrepreneurship in developing countries and encourage potential entrepreneurs in the field.

We have chosen to visit Mozambique and specifically the TechnoServe project because we see its immense potential and, based on preliminary evidence, believe the model is sound and may be scalable to transformative dimensions. We thank you in advance for the support of the Jackson Institute and we look forward to sharing the fruits of your generosity when we return in the fall.

48 Stunden in München

Achtundvierzig Stunden mit einem meiner Lieblingsmenschen in einer meiner Lieblingsstädte der ganzen Welt.

As if the capris and even more ubiquitous smoking rooms in the Munich Airport left any room for doubt that I was in Europe, the first thing I saw outside the terminal was a protest:

Re-redefining Münchner Freiheit

Manolis and I headed first to his apartment in Messestadt to drop off my bags and freshen up...

...before heading to Odeonsplatz:

Wilkommen in Deutschland, home of Mercedes-Benz and the U-Bahn
(and a 90% chance that you're in one or the other)

Feldherrnhalle, a monument to the heroes of the Bavarian Army

We popped into the Englischer Garten for a late lunch on Galeriestraße and a walk around Hofgarten:

Manolis diving into the really awful tagliatelle

Deutsches Theatermuseum

Diana-Tempel

Bayerische Staatskanzlei (Bavarian State Chancellery)

Then headed south along Marstallplatz to Maximilianstraße:

Marstallplatz

Cool art exhibition near Salpeterstraße

The building where Manolis worked this summer

Maximilianstraße, the most expensive real estate in Germany

We crossed Maximilianstraße and continued south past the Hofbräuhaus to Marienplatz, home to both the old and (relatively) new city halls of Munich.

The sacred location of my brother's first Maß five years ago

Neues Rathaus (New City Hall)

Then took the U-Bahn to Kolumbusplatz for a stroll along the Isar River:

Wittelsbacherbrücke

Reminded me of the locks on Namsan

To the north, the Deutsches Museum

God save compound nouns.

After our walk, we headed back to Messestadt for dinner, which consisted of whiskey, Wurst, Greek tomato salad and homemade fries.

The next morning, we visited the Deutsches Museum, the world's largest museum of science and technology. The 28,000 objects on display span over 50 fields ranging from pharmacy to tunnel construction to hydraulic engineering. Incidentally, it seems revealing of German cultural identity that the national science museum is referred to simply as the 'Deutsches Museum' rather than the 'Museum von Meisterwerken der Naturwissenschaft und Technik' (though I suppose brevity may also be a factor).

Deutsches Museum

Museum entrance

Aviation exhibit

We then crossed Ludwigsbrücke and to catch a movie at Museum Lichtspiele, the cinema-slash-hipster hangout of Lilienstraße.

Am Gasteig

Stopped for a snack at a sidewalk newspaper stand with an impressive drink selection

After watching Super Acht in a crowded room full of tobacco-scented cool cats (who, in my opinion, provided better entertainment than the movie we paid to see), Manoulaki and I concluded we needed to splurge a bit on dinner, and we headed back north across the river for seafood at Brenner, a beautiful restaurant tucked inside the Weil, Gotshal & Manges building on Maximilianstraße. Dinner was followed by a late-night exploration of the neighborhood of the Jewish Museum, which somehow resulted in Greek radio and a contentious conversation about the alleged shortcomings of Stuttgart.

On Monday, Manolis left the apartment early in the morning for his German language course in Lehel, so I turned on the TV after breakfast and caught the end of an episode of Sturm der Liebe before deciding to head down the street to the Riem Arcaden shopping center, where I picked up two CDs–Wenn Worte meine Sprache wären by Tim Bendzko and An und für sich by Clueso–as well as a copy of a brilliant book titled Alles, was ein Mann wissen muss (All that a man must know). Seriously, let me know if you ever need an analysis of Picasso's periods, descriptions of various shirt collars, or techniques for physical combat.

I then headed to the Munich Residenz, the former royal palace of Bavarian monarchs (and the highlight of my first trip to Munich several years ago). The Residenz served as the seat of government and primary residence of the House of Wittelsbach from 1508 until 1918, during which it evolved into a magnificent complex of palaces, buildings, and gardens in the heart of the city.

The four lions of Residenzstraße (tapped in succession for good luck)

Antiquarium

Audienzzimmer (Audience Chamber)

Kaisersaal (Emperor's Hall)

Ahnengalerie (Ancestral Gallery)

Cuvilliés Theater

After my tour of the Residenz, I crossed back through Odeonsplatz to Cosmo Grill to meet Manolis for lunch, which consisted of juicy burgers and Currywurst. The latter is one of the reasons that Germany is one of two countries in which I regularly eat pork (the other being China). German Wurst + curry powder = a product of globalization almost as delicious as poverty alleviation, at least in theory.

Bayerische Staatsoper (Bavarian State Opera)

We decided to spend the afternoon in Schwabing, a borough of northern Munich famous for its bohemian history and its rise to global prominence during the Prinzregentenjahre of Prince Regent Luitpold's reign, during which the neighborhood was home to influential artists and thinkers including Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ludwig Klages, Wassily Kandinsky, and Christian Morgernstern. Today, Schwabing, with its growing concentration of bars and restaurants, is one of Munich's most desirable addresses for young professionals.

Hohenzollernstraße

Mein Lieblingsdichter

Somewhere in the world, a young man named Lambros is rejoicing.

After our walking tour of Schwabing, we headed south along Leopoldstraße toward the Siegestor (Victory Gate). After suffering heavy damage during World War II, the gate was reconstructed with a new inscription, which reads, "Dem Sieg geweiht, vom Krieg zerstört, zum Frieden mahnend (Dedicated to victory, destroyed by war, reminding of peace)."

Our last stop before I had to leave for the airport was the University of Munich, one of the top institutions of higher education in the country.

The atrium of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München also serves as a
monument to the members of the White Rose intellectual resistance group.

Outside the university

Alas, it never fails to amaze me that a weekend can disappear in what seems like a blink of an eye. Vielen Dank für die schöne Zeit, Manoulakimou!

Next up: Mozambique, here I come!

IAH - FRA - MUC

I'm currently sitting in Houston Intercontinental's Terminal E, waiting for my flight to Munich (for an extended layover on the way to Maputo), snacking on my last bag of fruit snacks from the BCG office and trying to ignore a vocally gifted Italian woman who is either having a nervous breakdown over the phone or...actually, I think she's scolding her son-cum-idiota about credit card expenses.

The mournfulness of the fado on my iPod isn't quite drowing out her protestations, so I'm switching over to some Knorkator–unfortunate, since I need to brush up on my Portuguese for my three weeks in Mozambique. On the other hand, Knorkator is doing a great job of pumping me up for my weekend in Germany, which I've been looking forward to all summer.

Manoulakimou, hier komme ich!

TYBCG

For providing a summer intern with legitimately interesting casework.

For your buddy system.

For turning a Powerpoint/Excel noob into a slightly less bumbling MS Office user.

For the daily bowl of peanut butter M&Ms.

For an awesome line-up of summer events, including a retreat about which I decided not to write a post and the 11th best day of my life.

For making me comfortable with using the word "iterate" more frequently than any other verb. On second thought, that might fall under the NTY category.

For my new phobia of jelly beans.