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Letter from Mozambique
August 22, 2002 |
Alumnus Peter Bechtel '81 recently wrote to President Durden sharing his experiences as Quirimbas National Park Project Coordinator.
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Dear Sir,
I am writing to you at the insistence of my parents, Dan and Joan Bechtel, who tell me that you are keenly interested in the doings of Dickinson alumni, even alumni who have been out of contact with Dickinson for a great many years.
Part of my lack of contact may be attributed to geography, I suppose, if one wishes to be generous. I have lived in Africa since graduation, first in Swaziland and then for the past seven or eight years in northern Mozambique.
 I have recently undertaken something of a shift in gears careerwise. After 20 years of rural development and agriculture support to poor rural communities, I became convinced that there were better ways to solve the problems of rural poor people than simply giving them things; fertilizer, seeds, fishing nets, wells, technical advice, training courses, etc. ad nauseum. There were two reasons for this.
First, in many cases support with technological improvements (fishing nets for example) often resulted in more efficient resource use and therefore more rapid depletion of the resource base; the fisheries of most of Mozambique are in the last stages of exhaustion due to 20 years of this sort of support.
Second, I got tired of treating people as if they had nothing to offer. I cling to the belief that nearly everyone has something to offer and, in the case of northern Mozambique, what the local folks have to offer is obvious. They live in some of the most wild and beautiful and biodiverse areas left on this planet. Why not change focus, I thought, from simply handing out buckets of donor support, to creating a partnership aimed at preserving and conserving these areas?
This is not to neglect the human problems, but rather to address them as well as the environmental issues at the same time. Everybody has to win, I decided: the local people, who need a better life; the fish and the elephants, who need to survive and thrive; and the rest of the world (the donor countries, tourists, and anyone interested in the environment), who are concerned about planetary health and biodiversity.
I found a lot of support for these ideas within Mozambique. Rural fishermen, government employees, tourist investors, and even politicians saw the sense of this idea. What I did not find was donor support, so willy-nilly I left the sphere of gainful employment and set out, unfunded, unpaid, and resourceless (but with a lot of friends) to see what could be done.
To her everlasting credit, my wife Ruth understood what I was doing and took care of the family farm while I stayed in Mozambique. We had high phone bills. My parents also pitched in with financial support at crucial times, saving me from having to bet the farm in the most literal sense of the phrase.
Eighteen months passed and I am delighted to say that the gamble paid off. On June 6, 2002, the Mozambican government offically gazetted the Quirimbas National Park, 7500 km2 of wilderness, islands, bays, and open sea. The area has some of everything: mountains, forest, savannah, swamps, lakes, rivers, estuaries, mangroves, corals, seagrass, sharks, whales, elephants, lions, eagles, flamingoes, an historic old slaving and trading town (now in ruins), and yes, people. Forty villages were involved in the creation of the Park. So was the World Wildlife Fund, who came on board to finance the Park after visiting us in June last year.
 The Park in the largest marine protected area in Africa, the first Park to be declared in post-Independence Mozambique, and the first Park anywhere ever to be created at the request of local inhabitants. The park goals reflect the fact that the Park must be for the good of all, for whales and lions and local residents and visitors.
I am writing to you now because the timing seems appropriate. On the 25/26th of September 2002 there will be an official opening ceremony for the Park which the General Secretary of WWF International, Dr. Claude Martin, will attend, to offer thanks to those involved in the Park creation. We hope there will be good press coverage. At the same time, the first ecotourist venture in the park will be opened, the Quilalea Marine Sanctuary, which I created with two friends and partners to demonstrate to the WWF and others that yes indeed something could be done for conservation in the north; it was only after a visit to this small pilot project that the WWF agreed to come on board and fund the creation of the much larger Park. Lastly, the WWF has published a little story I wrote about the community work on their website. The relevant web sites are:
I hope this e-mail is not unwelcome. When I think about my Dickinson education and how it all relates I have to say that I never got paid for anything I ever studied and everything I ever got paid for I never studied. Of course all you Dickinson professorish liberal arts types take this sort of comment as a compliment.
Stay well, estamos juntos.
Peter H Bechtel, class of 1981 I think
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