Grant Proposal

Underwater Africa was providing school supplies only when volunteers expressed interest in visiting a local school, and I felt like that was too haphazard and unpredictable so I talked to Callum about organizing a formal grant for 1,000 MT / month. That way the school would have more flexibility on what supplies to get and it'd be more regular so they could plan it into their budget.

He said to go talk to the school about it, but the car wasn't available and we'd missed the chapa (small van that runs a routelike a bus), so Katie and I set out to hitchhike.

Katie normally gets picked up pretty quickly--apparently western looking women have an easy time getting rides--but with me there it wasn't so easy. We got about halfway there before I started walking ahead so it looked like Katie was alone. The first car that passed with this new strategy stopped and picked us up. The driver was just coming back from a fishing trip and I squeezed in back alongside his fishing lines.

We got to the school and I showed the director my proposal. Once she heard the amount of money she got very excited. Their whole budget for 2017 was 40,000 MT (~$650), and with the financial crisis that hit Mozambique after it came out that the government had $2 billion in undisclosed debts, the schools budget was cut by 43% down to only ~23,000 MT (~$375) for the entire year of 2018. That meant that our measly 1,000 MT / month (about the cost of dinner for two at a nice restaurant) would actually almost entirely make up for the budget cut.

I asked to see their books to see what kinds of records they were keeping, since we'd need some way of documenting what the grant money was being spent on, and I was pleasantly surprised to see how thorough the accounting was. They had receipts for everything. I tied out one of the subtotals on the summary page to be sure. It was exactly what we needed in order to get the grant approved. I got some photos to show Graeme and Malcom and we caught the bus home so I could go update the grant proposal and send it out. The students love taking photos of themselves so we let them get in a few selfies by the bus stop before we said goodbye.



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