About our work in the project “Food for Knowledge” Mozambique
Andrea and Marta, November team 2016 “Fighting with The Poor”
Hi, we are Andrea and Marta. We are two DIs from CICD - England and we are in Mozambique since May 2017.
We are working with ADPP Mozambique - FFK (“Food For Knowledge”), that is a big project that works with different activities in the province of Maputo.
We had the opportunity to decide in which district we wanted to work and we choose Manhiça.
Since the beginning the project gave us freedom to work in what we felt more confortable with, so we choose to work with “Clubes Escolares”.
In the first weeks they gave us the opportunity to get to know the project itself, so we were trave-ling to the 4 districts that the project is working with (Manhiça, Moamba, Magude and Matutuine). In that time we got to know what the projects actually do, whom are they working with and how they work. But not just this - these first weeks were very important because we learn how to travel in Mozambique, how the people communicate, got to know the Mozambicans, and for us this is a really important thing to do when you arrive to another, completely different, country.
After these weeks we started to work with the project, with this “Clubes Escolares” and we started by making a manual that has different ideas about how we can teach the kids by playing, some different and new games, some different activities, etc. Our idea since the beginning was that this manual could be implemented in all the schools that the project is working with.
We tried to make it in the best way possible and the workers of the project helped us finish it and make it in a way that is beautiful, useful and also easy to understand.
After that, we started to organise some trainings for the teachers of these clubs in the 4 different districts of the project, together with the leaders of the districts.
Then, after talking with the leaders of the project, we developed the idea to start a different type of project inside of the big project: the construction of classrooms.
FFK is a project that works with (more or less) 270 schools, and in the construction they focus in the creation of kitchens, water pumps and latrines. But, in Mozambique there’s also a big lack of other infrastructures like classrooms, and the children study below the trees. After we faced this reality we thought that we could help the project in a parallell way, creating three classrooms in one of the schools. So we started to fundraise money in Europe and also asked for donations in some Mozambican companies.
We managed to raise almost 5000 Euros and we also got donations of a lot of materials.
All the way during the process of the construction of the school, we counted with the help of the project. Since the beginning they were by our side helping us with everything that was needed, starting with the plans of the construction, the transportation of the material, they were there to help us out with everything they could do for us!
So our experience was not all the time with the same part of the project, but I think that the way that we found to help/work with the project was a good one. FFK is a very big project, has many people working, and everything is organised so that everything works. We had some tasks completely inside the project, but then we thought that we could be more useful also by creating classrooms in this school with the help of the community. This way we had the opportunity to work inside the project and also directly with the community, and that was really important for us.
