You can tell a lot about a city by the names of its streets. War heroes and politicians and cultural icons become immortalized on small green and white signposts, or etched in marble on the sides of buildings, or, as in Chimoio, painted in faded yellow on the dusty curb.
Here in Maputo, the street names unabashedly tell of a socialist past. To get from our apartment uptown to the internet cafe we are using in the downtown baixa, our path was as follows -
Head down Av. Vladmir Lenine to Av. Mao Tse Tung. Take a left and continue to Av. Salvador Allende. Go past Av. Eduardo Mondlane and turn on Av. Julius Nyerere. Keep going until Av. Frederich Engels, take another left, and you have arrived.
Interesting that now, along all of these streets, you find the offices of neoliberal, market-oriented, international development organizations like the World Bank and USAID...
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Speaking of international development projects, we just got word from the Dutch Embassy representatives that our proposal for the tea processing unit has passed Phase 1 evaluations. We will have a site visit at the end of the month, followed by a conference call with the potential funders as well as our project partners in Zimbabwe. If that all goes well, it is likely that the project will be approved!!!!
A much-needed dose of motivation as I wade through endless documents about rural microfinance initiatives in Mozambique for the current proposal I´m putting together for the European Union.
1 comment:
echoes of the cold war, and the troubled past of southern africa... sounds pretty surreal to me when they're the surroundings of people just trying to get on with their lives...
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