ARM WRESTLING AGAINST INJUSTICE
Barbara Hofmann's surprising story in Mozambique
by Laura Salvinelli
"During the hardest times, I slept an hour and a half to three a night and ate three times a week. But how can you say you can't take it anymore and go to the children who fight for food with stray dogs in landfills, to the 18-year-old girl who's been prostituting herself since she was six and who tells you they don't hurt her anymore and has forgiven them? Or to the boy, also six, who got his ass brocken—I took him to the hospital for reconstruction—for a plate of cornmeal mush? Anger is useless because it makes you irrational. I try to arm wrestle against injustice, because it's not right. To change things, to help." Barbara Hofmann is telling us her story; we're in the house where she lives, in the bush of Vilankulo. But let's go back to the beginning.
Barbara was born 63 years ago in central Switzerland to a German mother of noble origins and a Swiss father, a luthier and musician. At twenty-seven, after seven years of working in financial management, she found herself "by chance" in Mozambique for an international institution. It was 1989, and the country was in the midst of a civil war, which would end in 1992. The young Swiss woman discovered child soldiers, war orphans, and street children and made a big decision: "There was a lot of talk about doing something, but in reality very little was being done. So I decided to act." Since getting a project approved by the government required an organization, she quit her job, returned to Switzerland, founded ASEM, the Association for the Support of Mozambican Children, sold all her possessions, and returned to Beira, the country's second city. In addition to the war, there was a terrible drought, and as always, the children paid the highest price. She began her work with the Programa da sopa: with the participation of Mozambicans, even those who could only manage a tomato or a handful of rice, and the availability of a mosque well and a neighbor's yard, she guaranteed a bowl of soup a day and water for drinking and bathing for 300 children for up to six months after the end of the war. "When I asked the children, 'What do you want, what is your dream?' The answer was always the same: to be able to eat without rummaging through the garbage and having to prostitute myself, and to go to school," she says. So, after winning her battle against the government and securing the land, with the help of older children and Alpine troops from the ONUMOZ peacekeeping mission, she built her first center, "where we've become a family, and we provide healthcare, clothing, psychological rehabilitation, school, extracurricular activities, carpet and basket making, music, dance, and theater—we've always used art as psychological support. Our organization is not a business, nor a factory; it's based on the principle that children should feel at home and thrive. And we've abolished the pyramid system with a big boss at the top: everyone does everything and can question everything." There are now four centers: two in Beira, one in Vilankulo, and one in Gorongosa, and ASEM also has offices in Italy, Mozambique, Canada, and the USA. For her commitment, Barbara has won prestigious international awards, such as THE ONE International Humanitarian Award in 2014. But the most important is being recognized as a maman by the 200,000 children she has taken off the streets, educated, and reintegrated into their communities.
"There are more boys, because girls here are paid a bride price, and there's a tendency to keep them at home. But also because many, from the age of four onwards, have said to themselves: 'I'm a man, I'm strong, and I can handle myself. If mommy has fewer mouths to feed, she'll be better off.'" Barbara is talking to us about the meninos da rua. "Being on the streets has two aspects, the negative and the positive, from their point of view. There's abuse of all kinds, starting with sexual abuse, and there's the risk of being burned with a tire for any reason. You have to belong to one group or another. You have to sleep on the streets and eat out of the garbage. But there's also the freedom to do what you can't do at home, which many emphasize. Some brought them to us, initially the soldiers, some grandmothers, another street child who showed up with a smaller one, perhaps saying, "He's no good, he'll die on the streets, we're tough, but take him." There are also some I picked up half-dead on the street, put in a car, and brought to the center where they usually stayed. But it was always their choice to stay and change their lives, because here we have rules that help prepare them for reintegration into the community: going to school, participating in an extracurricular activity, helping cook and clean the common areas. Obviously it's not easy, and at first some come and go, but those who decide to stay have already begun a path of change.
How did she manage as a foreigner, a white woman, a woman, in a country where children are commodities for human and organ traffickers, for prostitution, and drug dealing? "I still ask myself that question and I don't know," she admits. "I've received several death threats from local and international sources, and I've survived several attacks. One night I was with my three children, who were small at the time, and some strangers armed with machetes entered our house. I asked them how much they'd been paid, they told me four dollars, I offered them four and a half, and we temporarily became 'friends’. Another time, they tried to kill me while I was driving."
The civil war in Mozambique ended in 1992. After the peace process, the People's Republic became the current Republic, which no longer has anything socialist about it. The only party in power since independence in 1975, Frelimo, has fallen into the hands of a group of oligarchs who enrich themselves by making deals with the traffickers Barbara mentioned and with foreigners who exploit the country's immense energy resources, leaving the population in poverty. While economists have calculated that a family with two children can live on as little as 30,000 meticais (about 400 euros) a month for basic expenses, the minimum wage is 5,850 meticais (about 78 euros). And everything is paid for dearly, from schools to healthcare. During my trip, I met someone with intimate knowledge of the rebellion following electoral fraud and the repression it faced. I won't mention his name for security reasons. He told me about demonstrations that began peacefully, with people singing the national anthem and banging pots and pans. He spoke of the fury of the people who, after the first killings, responded by destroying party headquarters and the property of the powerful. Of the infiltration of groups that devastated schools and hospitals, blaming the protesters. Of the persecution of independent journalists. Of death squads. Of orders to hospital doctors not to treat those injured in the demonstrations. Of thousands of deaths, of mass graves filled for months by trucks unloading bodies every four hours. Of the opening of the gates of the maximum security prison in Maputo to free common criminals who were then used in the repression of the people, even described in the Western press as prison escapes, without questioning how 6,000 people managed to escape. Of the European Union's support for the Rwandan soldiers called in to quell the uprising.
Returning to Vilankulo from Beira, Barbara shows me the 45-kilometer route she walked in the rain during Cyclone Idai in 2019 with Zacarias Jose Ferro, a former child educated in one of the centers who has become Country Representative and Legal Representative of ASEM. She shows me villages and lands that were completely submerged and isolated for days, a mountain that had collapsed. Mozambique is one of the countries most devastated by cyclones, which are increasing in number due to climate change: there's one every year. And part of the ASEM centers are damaged.
Beyond the strength to face all this, perhaps the most surprising aspect of this story is that maman lives like Saint Francis and is afraid of nothing, "because fear is linked to possessions." She is not religious, although she has a very strong spirituality based on union with nature: "For me, it is life, God, everything: it gives us water, food, air, because without trees there is no oxygen; everything comes from Mother Earth. And we don't listen to her, we don't respect her, we harm her, we destroy her, we abuse her." Although she works on the ASEM board, she has chosen to live on donations, without a salary or income. She loves cats and has many, calling them all by the same name, Chat, which means "cat" in French, and therefore always has a cat. The house she's lived in in the bush for nine years has a thatched roof that lets in rain, wind, and dust. There's no running water or electricity, but some old solar panels which made it very difficult for me to recharge my computer battery. It's an indoor/outdoor space with 17 openings: "If I could, I'd live outside. Possession creates anxiety. I lived here for a year without windows or doors. When the first door arrived, the night before going to bed, I found myself locking it with everything else open! I was scared by how much we let our minds deceive us." Equally unique is her plan to move further into the bush at an age when one generally longs for a good pension and a nearby hospital: "I'll go live in a pagliote (the traditional straw hut), I'll farm a small plot of land, and my pension will be my 200,000 children, who are Africa's wealth. I'll help those who come to me solve their problems, because that's what I know how to do."
But she warns us not to sanctify her: "When I give presentations, conferences, meetings, many people tell me I'm brilliant, exceptional, they put me on a high pedestal, beyond their reach. In reality, I'm not a heroine, and I'm used as an excuse to justify their inaction. It's too convenient. But I point out that to be good, you don't need to go and save children in Africa and that injustices are everywhere."