1. How did I get here?
I entered service for office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees as a National Officer, grade 1 on 02 August, 1989.
At the end of my assignment as a junior diplomat (Third Secretary) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1986, I came back to Maputo. But not without a lady I had fallen in love with in Ethiopia, who was the Secretary to the Ambassador of Tanzania there, then a Major General by the name Sarakikya. And how did I get there from Mozambique to start with? I was a Third Secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Maputo, and was assigned to open a diplomatic representation of Mozambique in Ethiopia, in the company of three memorable colleagues, the Ambassador, Alberto Sithole, a Minister Counsellor, Mr. Katawala, and the Second Secretary, Eusebio Guido Martinho (he died in the accident with Samora Machel). The then Foreign Minister Chissano told us in no uncertain terms that opening an Embassy would not be easy, and that we should be supported by the Embassy of Tanzania. And my lady-in-waiting was there.
At the end of my posting and on our way from Addis to Maputo, we stopped in Dar-es-Salaam, got married, and continued our repatriation. In Maputo, I reported to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, my employer, and was told that to get married to a foreigner as a diplomat, I needed permission from high up. I understand the conditions have been abolished since. But then I asked myself: when was a junior diplomat like me going to be heard? I decided for the easier option and left the Ministry; the next day was employed by the Banco de Moçambique.
I had hardly done eleven months in the bank, a telegram came, asking me if I would be interested in servicing the OAU (precursor to the AU) as a translator of Portuguese for a period of two months. This language had just been introduced as an additional official working language of the organization. And with the invitation came with a quotation of the premium for my services. In two months, I would be making the equivalent of 3 years of salary at the bank. Make no mistake, the bank in Mozambique was one good employer when it came to salaries! On the other hand, the financial package for a free-lance translator was irresistible and I left, without informing my new employer. On my way from Maputo to Addis Ababa for my temporary assignment, I transited through Dar-es-Salaam and met an old acquaintance to whom I narrated my new movements. He was impressed but gave me a piece of advice: “You see, when you receive a box tied up with a long rope, do not rush to open it by cutting the rope. Untie it instead of cutting, you may need the rope later.” And so, I decided to write a letter of resignation and sent it by post to Maputo to my Director in the Banco. To ensure there was a record of orderly exit, or a semblance.
The 2 months in Addis Ababa turned into 11 months, intermittently providing services as a free-lance translator. I returned to Maputo and stayed unemployed for 4 months, took a few evening courses on computer literacy, a TOEFL exam while waiting for another call. It came, but from another direction. A certain David Kapya, whom I knew in the Embassy of Tanzania in Ethiopia, was now in Mozambique as a UNHCR official. He invited me to a drink at the diplomatic bar of the Tanzania Embassy in Maputo one evening. There, he said his boss wanted to know whether I would accept a 3-month contract with UNHCR in Tete.
Tete happens to be my Province of origin, so I accepted. The details are history. The Representative, a gentleman by the name Emmanuel Bentil Owusu (2022 picture inserted), served me a contract and I left Maputo gladly to go home. With my wife, and now with an 8-month kid.
Those were years of war in Mozambique and there were more than 1.1 million Mozambican refugees in Malawi, 80,000 in Zimbabwe, most immediate countries to Tete Province. There were also refugees in Zambia but we did not deal with those. And so, work commenced. At this point, I did not have any experience or opinion about my new employer. All I knew were readings from pamphlets portraying UNHCR work as helping the hapless and voiceless refugees around the world. It looked very much like the social work of a priest, a profession I was trained to be but failed. Was it the second-best thing to being a priest? I do not know.
2. But wow! Did I meet some interesting characters in UNHCR Tete!!
The first thing that struck me was that we were operating a light aircraft as an office! I worked with UNHCR Tete for a year and half before I became international. I still was profoundly marked by my work in my own Province, as I was given the responsibility of warehouses in Blantyre (Malawi) for Mozambique. We flew over thin electric lines to some Districts, in one place we had to run for our lives to the aircraft, and the door did not close properly until we landed back in Chingodzi, Tete, and other events I would not be seen involved in today. War times! In fact, one never knows what makes one survive.
And then there were the work colleagues, each one a character in his/her own right!
There was our office Administrative Secretary, a Somali lady who, we came to discover, used to keep office cheques in her chest. And she said one day she was crossing the Zambezi River bridge on foot and did something to her clothes and a cheque of $15,000 flew into the river below. That was as remittance from our Maputo office for our salaries of the month and other office supplies. And we had to wait for another cheque, which was not issued until they had established that truly she had lost it. Twenty of us waited one more month to get our salaries. Fortunately, this was an entry incident I never experienced in this organization. Salaries were on time, exactly like a Swiss contraption for the full 32 years of my service.
And I came to depend on timely schedules, first because of this detail, reinforced 18 years later with my experience of timeliness in Switzerland, Geneva. That will come in another article.
We also had another colleague, a Nigerian United Nations Volunteer, engineer. Very lively in the way he talked, in the way he addressed people, always happy and always respectful of everyone. He never expressed himself without energy. One day he was stopped by a policeman who wanted to see his motorcycle license. Whatever happened, he ended holding the policeman by the collar and was taken into custody. The policeman’s supervisor was my cousin, so I rushed to him and he was released. He said however: “where did you see a civilian holding a policeman by the collar? Tell him this is not Nigeria”.
Mr. Kapya, our Head of Sub-Office in Tete, informed us that Ms. Sadako Ogata, High Commissioner for Refugees at the time, was coming to Tete with James Ingram, then WFP Executive Director, and wanted to go see how we receive returnees from Malawi in a place called Mutarara. So, we needed to go ahead and prepare the reception. We went; it is an isolated town not far from the border. We camped in a village with no hotels, no guest houses, no facilities. So, the village chief allowed us to settle under a tree, as we had come with our field box (it contained a tent, some inflammable materials, knives, a first-aid kit, a few dry biscuits and water, manuals and other small trinkets packed in Geneva). We erected a round tent by the tree but our bodies did not fit; our legs were outside. We decided to sleep anyway, after eating from the village offerings: grilled and dried mice and ugali. I am not sure of the time, but we slept and at one point something was licking our feet. We rose and we were facing three hyenas. I was not afraid but my Nigerian friend was, and he ran and decided to sleep in a branch of the overhanging tree. One hour later he fell like a bag. He still did not desist, rummaged through the field box, found a blue nylon rope, climbed again and slept there tied up. Madame Sadako and her escort came and went, and work continued. A small point I learned was that while we in Tete are afraid of snakes, not of hyenas, Nigerians are afraid of hyenas, not the snakes. I hope I am not generalizing, but I did work and live in Nigeria and could see the cultural convictions and differences.
And then our American pilot. You see, in those years and before UNHCR transferred all aircraft operations to WFP as per UN decision, UNHCR Tete was operating a light aircraft to visit the districts. Tete has 11 airstrips (almost one in every District). The man used to forget that the country was at war. At one point he decided to throw a football through the window into a town we were flying over, for the local schoolchildren, he said. We immediately received a hail of rifle fire that forced the man into almost a vertical climb. A few of us vomited in the aircraft from the maneuver (and maybe some of us wetted in our pants). Another day, he decided to fly under the Zambezi suspended bridge, just in Tete town. He was arrested immediately upon landing. Again, I prevailed on my cousin and he was released a few hours later.
My last incident of embarrassed memory in Tete was with a colleague, a Ugandan expatriate working with us, a P3, fond of the young ladies. He invited me to an evening beer and I found myself hemmed in by three girls in his car. That in itself was nice. What was not so nice was that he wanted to greet his friend the Governor of the Province on the way; and there we went with three young, noisy, painted, perfumed and dressed ladies, to meet a Governor. It may not have been an issue for a foreigner, but for a Mozambican to present himself to a whole Governor was in my time lack of discipline, let alone respect and breach of protocol. Had I not been a UN employee, I would never even come near a Governor as a Mozambican.
3. Messages
Did I learn in Tete? Yes, that was my first attachment to a UN Agency and it gave me an idea of all the possibilities of learning and career progress. And I decided that my career would be: service, being the best at my professional attributes, and learning. In Tete,
I learned basic computer skills,
I learned to prepare logically-structured, actionable and brief reports,
I learned that the UN system has a whole e-library that nobody encourages you to use but nobody prevents you from using it either,
I learned to read all official instructions, and I learned that not everyone reads them and therefore, here was an opportunity of being ahead,
I learned that if I was going to be a leader in my career, I would have to learn how to coach, which was a clear opportunity.
But I did not learn to coach in Tete. A subject for another time.
Jose, 02 May 2023
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