Thursday Morning. Last day of interviews. Here we spent the day on the Nando’s farm. Working with Percy, we set up our interview area with chairs, table and made sure to have our tablets ready to go.
Our first interview of the day was with Matilda Maté, aged 30. She lives at home with her mum and her 6 children (with 2 sets of twins! Ages 3 and 6, with her other two children being 11 and 14! She is a wonder woman!)
She has been farming with Nando’s for 3 years and really enjoys it! However she has to travel to collect water, whilst she is at work her mum and children travel to get water around 10 times per day!!
She is the main income for her family, and by using this income she can upgrade her house and water sources.
Our next interview of the day was Creusa Dias, aged 40, who was a joint owner of the Manicha farm. She lives at home with her husband and 2 children (her daughter is 10, and her son is 6). She owns a 2hectare farm and has been farming for just over a year!
Her main job is a working in a petrol station which provides her family a good wage but the farm is extra income. Her brother convinced her to get the farm as the learning process is good and would provide a new experience.
This interview was the easiest one as Cruesa was very good with English which meant we didn’t have to communicate through a translator as much!
The Nando’s farm has the Mozambique flag, with the start of a cairn at the bottom! A cairn, comes from Scottish Gaelic, meaning “pile of stones”. The aim is that people would bring a stone with them from somewhere in the world that means something, to place on top. It becomes a focal point for visitors because it creates a family, strangers who have never met before all places their stone here.
We managed to finish the interviews quickly, as we were now into the swing of things and completing the surveys. We had a few hours to chill in the sun before James would take us on a tour of Muxamba (Nando’s Farm). We spent this free time completing a Polaroid photo shoot with our best and worst poses, making the best memories.
On our tour of Muxamba we met farmers harvesting African Birds Eye chillies which is the ones we use in every Nando’s worldwide!
We saw the classroom where the students in the programme get taught about farming (not just chillies), preparation, growing and harvesting!
At the end of the tour we were allowed to pick some chillies of our own to take home, a spicy reminder of our time here!
Following the farm tour we met the people in charge of Tchau Tchau Malaria. A program that aims to try eradicate malaria in Moz. They raise money and fund it into things like spraying programs.
The spraying programs hire people to go into peoples homes and spray the walls with pesticide so that if the mosquito would land there it would die straight away. After 2 hours the people are allowed back into the home and are protected for 6-8 months.
“Malaria is a leading cause of death… but it is entirely preventable..”
NOTE: spraying is not as easy as it seems. These guys do not get enough credit! I had to tap out of the training experience as the cylinder was pressing against my rib, which I cracked about 2 months previous… so definitely not ideal.
Once we got home, we found ourselves ordering from Mundo’s again, which honestly no one had any objections to because their food is amazing! Nearly every item of food on this trip has been unreal, we’re lucky!
Again, we spent the night sitting on the top deck with a few drinks, unwinding after our day, and thinking back on the previous days.
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