I am going to Mozambique!
But to do what?
It took a few days before I and Jacopo found ourselves sitting face to face and talking.
“Simone, ENI Foundation has approved the project in Mozambique, off we go!” “Good! But what is it about?!? ”
The project, Jacopo explains to me, is simple: to create a theatrical performance to be put on stage in the African country, with Mozambican actors who come to do a course in Italy, in order to promote the health of mothers and children in the villages of the district of Palma in the north of the country a few kilometers from the border with Tanzania. The project is financed by ENI Foundation and will be carried out in collaboration with Doctors with Africa Cuamm that runs a health center right in Palma.
“A video crew will make a documentary film, then we will write a book, and the actors will go on a tour.”
“Jacopo, I’m sorry, where is the simple part?”
With the Technical Presentation of the Project in hand he began to list the different steps: first exploratory mission to gather information and learn about the Mozambican theater, second mission to meet and select a group of local actors, two theater workshops with these guys in Italy, a tour in five villages in the north of Mozambique and, eventually, a show in Maputo, a video documentary, a book and, of course, the entire promotional campaign of the whole project.
It often happens to me , maybe after two and a half hours of meeting with Jacopo that I get a little tired, so that I need to lie down for a few minutes. In this way my brain has time to process a thousand of pieces of information and the ten thousand inputs that always come after a meeting with the “boss”. Today I lay down on the couch at home and slept for three hours!
A year of work, in Africa again, confronting cultures that are very distant from us, with whom it is often difficult to relate, to understand one another…
And what language do they speak in Mozambique?
And in what conditions is Mozambique?
But, above all, where is Mozambique precisely?
Yes, ok, it is there on the map, but how far is it from Italy?
How many hours of flight time is needed?
What Africa is it?
“There is the sea!”
“Ah, the sea”, there was not even that in Burkina Faso.
At the end of the chat-brainstorming meeting with Jacopo the team orders were: “We will wait for the official approval of the project but meanwhile, we start to think about it.”
This sentence of Jacopo’s: “Meanwhile, we start to think about it.” always makes me laugh. We have to set up an acquisition team, meanwhile, we start to think about it. Maybe we need to promote a new product, meanwhile, we start to think about it. We will write a book about Seminole Indians, meanwhile, we start to think about … Sometimes you think about something for a little while , then something else happens, maybe the project will never see the light of the day, but meanwhile, other ideas come, other programs to start to think about. Other times the accomplishment of the idea is immediate and then the entire executive system gets moving and what seemed impossible two hours before is achieved in no time.
The approval of the “Mozambique” project comes after a couple of weeks.
During the following days I meet the adventure companions. The project has been edited and organized into sectors, everyone will have a person in charge, a budget, and there will be a general and regular coordination. Some of us will go to Africa, others will organize the next steps from Italy.
Yes, all right , but what do I have to do, exactly?!?
