Princess of Abu Dhabi

After visiting the village in Agust 2011 the Princess Sheika Mouza of Abu Dhabi fell in love with it and she wanted to help the poor people. Because of the month of Ramadan, the princess wanted first to help the community with food for the 150 poorest people of the village during the rest of the ramadan and also at the end of this month of fasting, giving them a donation..

So we organized to buy enough food for the resting 8 days of the ramadan and the rest of the money we divided between the 150 people who were selected to be mainly old people and orphans.

Beside the food, she wanted to renovate one of the 4 mosques. Since two the staff members are leaders in a new mosque that just had started building, I thought they should have the possibility to invite their head leaders to explain what would be needed to make it in to a proper mosque. She left us with the money and trust to make sure that all the money would be properly spent for the mosque.

So we made a proper investigation of what need to be done, bought the materials and negotiated with the builders to get it done a proper way. The mosque was ready in March 2012….

primairy school

We were shocked at first site of the primairy school that the community started building with the goverment money. We didn't know how much was given to the leaders, but the amount mentioned by the director of education of the district more would have been possible to do, then what we could see at that time.

They only wanted a roof.... so we ordered poles to be made in the bush. (trees are cut down by hand and sawed by hand into poles) and transported them to Ilha de Moçambique from where they arrived by boat to Cabaceira. Just before they arrived, we found out that more or our land was sold by the government, although the leaders promised us that that part would only be reserved for us... who can you trust... so we decided to stop all project to the community and stored the poles at the lodge till we had more security that the rest of our land would not be sold.

After finally organizing a meeting with the head of the district, he got fired that same day for fraude of community money, bad treament of his staff and having an afair with many wifes/daughters of his staff members... So we had to wait again till a new head was installed (a woman this time), our problems where clear to her and she had time to organize a meeting with the community and the management of the lodge to get to a proper agreement.

After the meeting and getting in writing that the rest of the land would be ours, we started with the construction of the roof of the primairy school. This was finished in Agust 2012...

first projects

After starting up the lodge for a year, we finally had a proper amount for the Cabaceira Pequena Fund to get started with a community project. With every guest paying $2,- per person per year and not having regular reservations yet, the fund didn't grow as quickly as especially the community was expecting and have had been regularly asked when we would finally get some things done.

With the leaders together with the goverment selling most part of our land, we didn't see them as the right partnes to be representatives of the community. Also the within the community many people did not trust their leaders as being responsible for filling their own pockets with other projects that started before us in the community (and because of that, failed to continue).

We decided to organize a meeting with the whole community and would let them decide on the project of their choice. We had made a list of projects with the representative of the primairy school, the clinic and the leaders and during the meeting we asked the people present to add any others. With the list complete they decided to start with putting electricity in the clinic and a roof on the new primairy school that they just started building with governement money.

First we started with the electricity in the clinic. We organized a electricien within the community, asked him what material he needed and negociated about the price to install it. Within 2 months everything was ready. Unfortunately to connect the installation to the Mozambican electricity network we had to organize contract for the installation, a stemp from the ministry of healty and only a half a year later this all was organized to be connected. With the donation of 2 guest for the connection to the network, more money stayed in the community fund to continue with the roof for the primairy school.