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Warms greetings from Maputo, Mozambique! My first work trip of 2009 and well-timed to miss the subzero temps in Boston! It's about 80 degrees humid here! It's been a very busy first week of my three weeks here. After the 1 hour flight to D.C., 18 hour flight to Joburg, and 1 hour flight to Maputo, I arrived at the Hotel Avenida on Sunday night with a horrible head cold and congested head. Monday morning I was at our office here. It's located in residential area and is a house that's been converted to office space. We have about 40 staff including 1 American (Country Director), a Togolese Deputy Director, 1 Portuguese Senior Adviser, 1 Brazilian Lab Adviser, 1 Burundian Adviser, and the rest local Mozambican staff! An eclectic mix- but fairly normal for Mozambique!

Settled first by Bantu-speaking people who travelled from the Niger Delta in West Africa, Mozambique was inhabited by a number of African tribes and thrived on trade with Arabia (given that it has over 1,500 miles of coastline on the Indian Ocean). Vasco de Gama landed here in 1498 and from the 17th century through the mid-1960's Portugal ruled its colony profiting off of the ivory and slave trades. Since the Portuguese and not the British colonized Mozambique, the "latin" influence is still largely felt here- with Portuguese being the official language, large laid back lunches & afternoon coffee and rolls being the norm. Mozambique won its independence in 1975 but civil wars ravaged the country until the early 1990's. The first multi-party elections were held in 1994! Infrastructure and human resources are scarce, and a large expatriate community exists here supporting the government in rebuilding. The expatriate community here is unlike any other - Portuguese, Brazilians, Latinos, and of course the Americans & other Europeans/Westerners.

Now that you've had a history lesson...I'm here for three weeks assisting our office in designing a national training plan for all the appropriate government staff in health commodity logistics. What that means....our project has worked with the government to improve the systems for distributing and ordering medicines- including ARVs, HIV test kits, Malaria drugs and tests, contraceptives, and essential medicines (basics like anti-biotics, etc.). Now that the forms for ordering and reporting have been updated, it is time to train the more than 2,000 healthworkers that will be using these forms and managing these products on a daily basis. This task is huge- and is going to rely on the help of multiple partner organizations that are working in Mozambique.

This past week I went from meeting to meeting talking to other organizations and partners who support the Ministry of Health here and whose programs have a vested interest in seeing medicines be available and in the right condition at the health centers. After all, you can't have an HIV testing program with out HIV tests! I met with partners from Medicos del Mundo, MSF, UNFPA, the Malaria Consortium, and other US Gov't funded partners including Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, Pathfinder, Columbia Univ (ICAP), I-TECH, Bassopa Malaria (Chemonics), FHI, and PSI. Next week it's Clinton Foundation, World Vision and a few others. We want to see how all these partners can work together to support this activity- because it's going to take a lot of time, money, and people to train 2,000+ people!

These interviews were interesting because in a few instances my counterpart did not speak English, I don't speak Portuguese, so I spoke Spanish (which they could understand) and they spoke in Portuguese (which I can understand when spoken slowly). Needless to say my brain was tired by the end of each day, but I was really thankful for everyone's patience. I am sure that I sounded like an idiot with my Portuguese talking to all the receptionists...."Bom dia/Boa tarde. Pode falar com Sr. ____" "good morning/good afternoon. Can I speak with Mr. _____?" And if a question followed to me, I was pretty clueless usually- aye- oh well!

Apart from work this week, I did manage to have some fun also. With the highlight being Friday night. Our Country Director, Marilyn Noguera and her husband, Ali Alwahti, and their friend Chris went out for sushi, ice cream and then to a show that was supposed to be somewhat exclusive. We went to this bar/club called Lebron downtown in what used to be a semi-red lightish district. We got there way too early- show was advertised to start at 10:30- but c'mon this is Mozambique, night life does not start until midnight at least! We drank our Laurentina beers and waited patiently while watching all the young 20-somethings come in dressed to the 9's! The gringos definitely didn't blend. Stewart Sukuma ( www.myspace.com/stewartsukuma ) was the guys name, and the show as pretty good! Check out his myspace page (or my video on my picasa site) for a live version! His backup vocalists were amazing and the percussionist made me want to go up there and play the bongos too! A Brazilian guy joined them toward the end with a trombone and then later playing a conch shell- pretty interesting!

The rest of the weekend was spent relaxing (and getting a bit sunburned) by the pool and enjoying a home-cooked dinner with Marily, Ali, their son Ayan, and their friends Claudia (Austrian/Swiss) and Mauricio (Brazilian) and their children (Nathan and twins Olivia and Hannah). How I wish my children would be as multi-lingual as these kinds- French, English, and Portuguese were all being spoken and understood by all of these little ones! So jealous- I should be taking them with me on my interviews to translate- and the oldest of them is only 5!

Thanks for reading- more next week....here are a few photos...

http://picasaweb.google.com/ehasselberg1/Maputo2009#

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