A Gator in Mozambique

Arlindo Alpin Paulino, 25 –
Carvão maker

Not even to the morning’s final destination, yet I’m exhilaratingly exhausted. My tattered jeans are weighed down by the amassing dew being collected from passing corn leaves while my exposed forearms are shredded by the overgrown sawgrass. To me, our path seems uncertain: a sharp left here, a random cut there. But, no worries, my guide is an expert and has made this journey many times before. It’s only 6am and I’ve already biked 30 minutes up and down narrow mountain trails, cut through thriving machambas, and rumbled along on overgrown “paths” eagerly following the footsteps of Arlindo, one of the many area carvão makers.

Now I’m soaking wet, pants rolled up past my knees, sandals in one hand, a 5-liter jug of water in the other, as I slowly ford the murky Mucipine River. It’s a precarious balancing act for me as I feel my way across the muddy riverbed. Sizing up my companion’s situation though, I definitely have it easier. Sure enough, next to me ready to show me up, there’s Arlindo with his 3 year-old baby girl capulana-ed across his back, shoes in hand while also lugging a sack full of axes and food for the morning’s activities.

We cross the river safely. “Now we’re really in the middle of nowhere…” I think. No houses to be seen in any direction, only a rarely used path urging us ahead. Once we put our sandals back on, there’s only few more minutes of hiking, before, all of a sudden, Arlindo stops and points at some trees, indicating that this is where we’re going to be working today. Looking at the plot of sparse trees, I immediately have some grand idea that we’ll be cutting down acres today, but that’s before I see how hard the hand labor is… with dull axes nonetheless!

Arlindo is an oddball of sorts in the area. Unlike most local residents, he was actually born a good distance southwest of Nauela in the district of Namarroi back in 1986. With the early death of his father, however, he left home at the age of 6 and moved to Gurue to live with his uncle, a successful honey farmer. Eventually, Arlindo migrated with other family members over to the Alto Molócuè area and soon after, having completed only 7th grade, had to stop going to school because he could no longer finance his studies without the help of a father/uncle. Lacking anyone insisting otherwise, Arlindo reasoned to drop out and start planting rice fields in the fertile valleys just outside of the city. Although the rice grew plentifully and provided an immediate income, Arlindo’s dreams of one day becoming a primary school teacher or medical technician were thrown to the wayside and left behind before really even having a chance to take shape.

Looking to settle down, Arlindo met and married his wife, Esmerelda - a Nauela native, two years later in Alto Molócuè. Soon thereafter, however, she became very ill with a mysterious disease causing pains in her stomach and back and leaving her extremities inflamed. With minimal access to Western medical treatment, her condition persisted for 3 years as the newly married couple sought out curandeiros, or traditional healers. After finally being attended to at the hospital in Molócuè though, she eventually recovered. Almost at the same time Arlindo became “sick”, but with a so-called traditional illness. According to him, he had been doing relatively well financially (farming success allowed him to open a make-shift movie theater – AKA a closed hut with a tv, dvd player, and speakers )and thus people were allegedly going around wishing bad things upon him which in turn made him act “muluku”, or crazy. To remedy the problem, he regularly saw a curandeiro over a 2 month period… leaving with a “healed-spirit” but destroyed finances (traditional healers can be rather pricey!).

***

Rather than deterring people from seeing traditional healers, the pricey-ness of these treatments actually make people feel as if they are investing in their health when going and spending all that money (compared to the national health care system which is largely free). In fact, just recently their baby boy was sick and the first place they took him was the traditional healer. Only after a weekend of the illness persisting did they take him to the hospital. It’s not a matter of convenience, either. The traditional healer they use is actually located past the hospital. The parent’s opinion is that the child has malaria. But what is “malaria” really? It’s confusing because most people say “malaria” here if it’s what we’d describe as flu-like symptoms. Thus there’s a common misunderstanding that the hospital should give anti-malaria meds to a patient with any kind of fever.

Observing Arlindo’s daily surroundings - fire, wood, and ash – all have been incorporated into his preferred traditional medical treatment of common illnesses. It’s no wonder he’s so hesitant to go to a place that is going to tell him to take a white pill that seems so foreign and different to everything good that he experiences on his healthy days. While out in the forest chopping wood with me, Arlindo seeks out a special kind of tree whose root’s bitter juices are mixed with water and ash to avoid manchas, or marks, on one’s skin. He prepares a batch for me, I try it, and he beams as my entire face puckers at the extreme sharp taste – “That’s how you know it works” he says and resumes his chopping.

***

After their illnesses, Arlindo and Esmerelda found themselves poor and without hardly any food to sell or eat. Desperate, Arlindo sought out and learned a new profession from some of the older community members in Molócuè: how to make carvão – partially burnt wood that is preferred for cooking due to its quick-catching nature and the lack of smoke it produces while burning. Although the work is physically taxing and requires long days, Arlindo discovered that the stream of money that comes in is good and relatively secure.

When they elected to move from Alto Molócuè to Nauela 2 years ago to be closer to his wife’s family, they entered into a similar situation as before – moving during the middle of a growing season and being granted a plot without forgiving, fertile land. Without hesitation, Arlindo restarted his carvão business to be his family’s primary source of income. Although he once had had lofty dreams to continue studying and start a real profession, he now just hopes to earn enough money to be able to get some better land (in Molócuè or Nauela) and continue to support his family as a farmer/carvão maker.

Arlindo and Esmerelda have been blessed with two kids, a girl that’s 3 years old and a boy that’s 1 ½ years old. Unfortunately though, he and his wife are both orphans of one parent (Arlindo lost his dad and Esmarelda lost her mom when they were still kids). This is especially devastating because the grandmother on the mother’s side is supposed to help out a lot with the grandchild rearing in Nauela’s matrilineal culture. Arlindo’s mom is still alive and well in Namarroi but the area’s tradition is to stay near to where the wife’s family is. So here they are, doing everything they can to raise their two kids largely unaided… which is quite a feat anywhere, but especially so in rural Mozambique.

Pointing at a large clearing to our left, Arlindo proudly informs me that in only 2 months work he was able to make 6000 meticais (~ 30 mets a day = $1 dollar a day) by cutting down, burning, and selling off the produced carvão. It’s crazy to think about that math – I mean, I remember always hearing those NGO commercials saying “For just a dollar a day you can help feed and clothe a child in Africa…” Well that’s sort of true… except that’s for an ENTIRE family! To be fair though, Arlindo’s cash earnings versus expenses don’t reflect the fact that his family largely eats and drinks without paying (they get water from a neighborhood well and eat what they grow in their field). In reality, (although some is spent on things like cooking oil, salt, sugar, and alcohol) most of the cash-money actually is stored away as savings for non-daily expenses (like buying a new bicycle, a tin roof for the house, traveling, buying new property, etc).

After just one day of working alongside Arlindo, I’ve started associating his income with the amount of work that is required to get it. When reflecting on a recent purchase it’s like “Wow! Are those crackers I bought in Quelimane really worth 2 days of hard labor?” Definitely not! But then again, life is very different for me 1) my work is not “hard labor” and 2) I’m getting a salary (~7000/month or ~$6 dollars a day) so no matter what I do, save get fired, I’ll get that money. Very different mentality!

In order to make good carvão, you have to cut down certain types of tree. If you use the wrong type (i.e. - mango trees), they simply won’t burn as well. After cutting down the trees, you need to further chop them up into meter-long logs, to facilitate later stacking, and then let dry for 2-3 days. Once you’ve waited for the logs to dry a little, you pile them up, cover them with cut grass and then sand, all the while leaving a small hole to place a fire inside. Once the fire is lit and going strong, cover the hole, and let the logs char for 3 days or so, checking periodically to make sure that too much smoke isn’t coming out (if a lot of smoke is coming out, then that means the wood has not stopped in the carvão phase but is instead completely burning to ash). As the logs and grass are charring, the sand will fall down and put out the fire before completely burning the log. As stated before, these partially burnt logs (carvão) are nice and convenient because they are quick to light and don’t give off a lot of smoke when used.

Environmental conservationists say this practice contributes to the area’s deforestation, but in Arlindo’s case, he is SLOWLY cutting down trees (with a dull axe!) that will one day serve as the crop field of a neighbor (who has given him permission). It works out for both parties because Arlindo is able to make carvão to sell and the farmer gains a cleared portion of his field. Personally (granted I might be biased now after having worked alongside Arlingo), I think the bigger worry for environmentalists should be the foreign companies, mainly Chinese in Zambezia, who come into Mozambique and remove large quantities of unprocessed, fully-grown trees in an instant with chainsaws.

Granted, the burning process does take a lot out of the soil where the fire pit is located...

Other farmers don’t take advantage of making carvão while clearing their fields for two reasons 1) it is highly labor intensive and not worth the effort when you have lots of land with good soil – for those lucky ones it’s better to simply put your time and energy into getting the most out of the available land rather than investing it in clearing less desirable land and 2) many area people don’t know how to make carvão and don’t use much of it in their house. Indeed, even relatively wealthy families like Wiado’s only use freshly cut logs to cook food and make bread. The main consumers of carvão are actually people in bigger cities who are driving through the area or Nauela’s high-rollers (i.e. – government employees, teachers, hospital technicians, and me).