The first field visit

Last week I stayed in the field for a bit longer than just half a day to say hello to important people. We (my colleague and I) spent two days in Os Gambos to prepare the Participatory Rural Diagnostic. For those who d not know what that is: It is a collection of methods to obtain a lot of qualitative information about an area. We discuss lots of issues with the people who live there, such as who does what and where, who is importnat and why who is rich and who is poor and how do you know, we talk about the past and together we draw a map of the area that indicates which natural resources are where. And of course we talk about the problems, let people prioritize the problems and talk about the cause of those problems. We talk to women and men separately.

To get some information beforehand, we talked to a biased sample f the inhabitants: those people who were trained as community based animal health workers by NGO’s. Although biased, talking to them does give you a good idea of what is happening and how large the gap between statistics and reality is.

In one case, the gap is unfortunately very small. Allmost everybody has many children, often more than 5 sometimes up to 10. And that suggests that some of the statistics are correct. And thos statistics show that over 50% of the populatio is younger than 14 years, about 10% is 15-20 years old and the remaining 40% is evenly spread over the ages 21-80. You do not need to be a mathematical genius to realise that the child mortality is frighteningly high.

The most probable cause is the lack of safe drinking water. In large parts of Os Gambos, rivers and manmade shallow dams are the only sources of water. Both are used by people as well as livestock and not just for drinking. So hygiene is awful and diarrhoea probably is a big problem and likely to be an important cause of child mortality.

The society is matrilineal and polygamy is accepted. Matrilineal means (in this case?) that the inheritance goes to the sons of the sister of the deceased. When she marries, a woman will move into the house of the man. Polygamy is not unusual, about 25% of the men have two wives and a few have three or even four wives

Many pepole, especially women, still dress in traditional clothes. That means a cloth around the waist and bits of string with beads and bones around the upper body. Women also cover their hair with a thick cake of yellow clay. I have not yet dared to make portraits yet, maybe later, when I know peopple better.

How to get a work visa

First, get yourself a contract with a company. The company will then write a letter of invitation in which they invite you to work in Angola and promise the Angolan Government that they will pay for your return flight. If you work in the development business, that will not be enough, you will also need an invitation from the ministry that is involved. Make sure that your company has an official stamp to stamp over the signature. Paper with just the company letterhead is not official enough, Angola loves stamps.

This sounds easy, but that is because I have not told you everything yet. The company invitation has to be authorized by the Angolan Ministry of Administration. And the Ministry of Administration only authorizes the invitation of the company after it has been notarized. Angolan notaries only notarize when you present the letter together with a copy of the registration of the company in Angola, mentioning the person signing the letter as director or partner. If the company is not registered in Angola, the letter has to be recognized by the Angolan embassy in the country where the company is registered. And that means a translation, see below.

In case you get an invitation from a ministry, be aware that the invitation has to be authorized by the Director of Human Resources before it can be authorized by the ministry of Administration. In the case of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, the Director of human resources only takes orders from the secretary general. So your contact in the ministry has to humbly request the secretary general to authorize the authorization of your invitation so that it can be authorized by the ministry of Administration (are you still with me?).

These invitations have to be submitted to the Angolan Embassy in your country, together with other documents such as your CV, your contract, a declaration of good conduct and a declaration that you are healthy and more specifically do not suffer from any contagious diseases. All these documents have to be translated in Portuguese, the official language of Angola, by a registered translator. The translations have to be notarized by the district court where the translator is registered, the notarization of the district court has to be recognized by the Ministry of justice of your country and the recognition of the Ministry of Justice has to be authorized by the ministry of Foreign Affairs of your country. Most of these institutions are open to the public from 9 to 12 and are at least three hours travel from each other, so count at least a day for each step.

Now, if you are have already visited Angola, even if only for a week, perhaps to get those invitations for example, you might be very unlucky. Because the Angolan Embassy in your country might insist on a declaration of good conduct from the Angolan Ministry of Justice, which you probably forgot to get while you were busy getting the authorization to get your invitation authorized for authorization.

When you got all the documents, managed to persuade the embassy not to insist on the declaration of good conduct from the Angolan ministry of Justice and have parted with a fairly substantial amount of money, you will receive a sealed envelope that you have to hand in to the Ministry of Strangers and Migration In Luanda. The embassy will stress several times that you are not allowed to open the letter. It is very important that the letter arrives sealed in Luanda.

When you arrive in Luanda, you go to the ministry of strangers and migration, to container 6 to be precise. You see, the building where the migration services were housed is being repaired they are working temporarily for a fairly long time in containers. The envelope will be ripped open and the civil servant will then hand it back to you telling you to make three photocopies of the official letter by the embassy that politely requests the minister to process your application and come back. Once you have done that, you receive the original back with a stamp and the assurance that your work visa will be ready in eight days. Don’t hold your breath, I am now waiting for over thirty days and the average seems to be 90 days.

The Elections

Just over a week ago, elections were held in Angola. The last elections, in 1992 had resulted in a return to civil war. So although eerybody was telling everybody else that this would not happen this time, there was some nervousness in the air. We (foreigneers) were told to stay away from large gatherings and such, because you never know when a clash between MPLA and UNITA supporters might happen.

In the end, the election campaigns went rather smoothly and there have been very few incidents, as far as I know. On election day, all was quiet. I live right infront of a voting station so I can tell you first hand that there were, at least there, no problems whatsoever. That is to say, I suppose that the people manning the voting stations found battling boredom quite a challenge in the second part of the afternoon. In the early morning, there was quite a queue, but by mid-morning anyone wanting to vote could do so withi 5 minutes and in the afternoon no-one turned up.

The results are already out and there was really no contest: MPLA won more than 80% of the vote. The one thing we will never know, though is which percentage of teh people went voting. No-one knows how many people live in Angola, with estimates from 14 to 20 million inhabitants and therefore it is hard to say whether 4 million votes is good or disappointing. Assuming that there are about 16 million people of whom about half are eligible to vote, I suppose 50% is not a bad show.

Which leads to the question why so many people voted for the MPLA. Because there is enough rumour and talk about corruption, Luanda is not exactly safe and there is a lot of poverty. Quite enough reason to expect a somewhat closer result than the one we got. But the other side is that life in Angola has become a lot better in the last four years. The government no longer has to spend vast amounts of money on the armed conflict and the oil price has been sky high for the last four years. So there is a lot of money around to spend on infrastructure, health and education. And even if there are doubts about the transparency of the system, the fact is that at least thousands of miles of road have been repaired, schools and health posts are being built, new affordable housing is constructed and new wells and boreholes are sunk. So perhaps people just voted for the devil they knew.

Living in Lubango

I live in Lubango, the capital of Huila Province. And living in Lubango is mostly dusty and expensive. I am nowing paying more rent for a two-bedroom apartment than we paid for a three bedroom house on the waterfront in Inhambane, or for an apartment in the better parts of Maputo. My apartment is on the first floor and the soccer pitch for amateur clubs is right in front of my house. Unfortunately it is about to be repaired (well, rebuild is probably a better description), so there are no official matches being played at the moment. The apartment is not very far from our future office and Ludger, who also works for GFA lives just around the corner. The bakery is 50 m up the road and around the corner there is a small shop with very irregular opening hours that sells daily needs (canned tuna, bottled water, soap and beer). So most necessities are available most of the time.

The neighbours are friendly, and love their music, one of the sons is a DJ and another is engaged in the sale of bootleg CDs (orders, anyone?). But they usually do not play their music very loud and when they do, usually not for very long. It is not half as bad as the continuous TV-noise we had to endure from our neighbours Santiago.

Otherwise, Lubango is a standard provincial town with a climate that is similar to that of Johannesburg or Harare. The city is situated at 1700 m above sea level and on three sides surrounded by an escarpment that rises to over 2000 m.and annual rainfall is about 700 mm. So it does not get too hot and there are few problems with malaria. On the other hand, it does cool down at night, especially in the austral winter (June – August).

On one end of the escarpment surrounding the city, the Portuguese built a miniature of famous Cristo Rei of Rio de Janeiro in concrete. Even the miniature is still impressively large, but that is about all that can be said for it. In my opinion it does not have any artistic merit. The expression on the face is rather wooden, something which, I suppose, could be considered quite an achievement if you are working concrete, but the result is still not very appealing. Luckily the statue is rather far away.

Lubango is, as I said, dusty. Very dusty. I am not sure where it all comes from, but every surface is always covered in a film of dust. You could polish your shoes (or have them polished) every morning. Indeed, shoe polishing seems to be a major source of income on the informal street market, shoe polishers are everywhere.