Thank you euro, for creating this alternate universe..

In 1975, just after Mozambique had won its independence from Portugal after a bitter struggle, a quarter of a million Portuguese settlers fled the country. Fearful for their lives, but also without prospect of a livelihood, the mother country was a safer bet.

With Portugal staggering economically, many now see the country's former colony as holding out more prospects than home.

He moved to Mozambique in 2010 after the financial crisis in Portugal convinced him that his future lay elsewhere.

"I decided to leave because I felt the situation in Europe was catastrophic," says the 42-year-old, who now lives in the capital, Maputo.

In Portugal, Mr Dias ran a company marketing cruise trips. But, after months of struggling, he shut it down.

Within a year he had relocated to Mozambique, where he set up a business building prefabricated houses.

Henrique Banze, Mozambique's deputy foreign minister, says about 200 tourist and working visas are being granted every day, marking a "huge increase" on recent years.

"In the last two years there have been many more Portuguese coming," he says adding: "I suppose it must be to do with the crisis in Portugal."

It is difficult to get firm figures for the influx, but Mr Banze says it is clear that thousands of Portuguese people are relocating each year.

The vast majority - around 20,000, according to some reports - base themselves in Maputo, where the majority of business opportunities exist.

"A tsunami hit Portugal and now everyone is coming here," says Mr Dias. "I don't believe the economic situation in Portugal will improve within the next five years."

Two years ago, when he arrived, most of his countrymen in Mozambique were manual labourers. Now, he says, the middle classes are moving in.

Some, he says, are working for large mining companies with operations in Mozambique. Others, like him, come to set up their own businesses.

He says the cost of living is high and he struggled during the first year in his new home until he established a partnership with a local businessman who provided the patronage needed to broker deals.

But he has seen his business grow, working on a range of projects from social housing to homes for employees of mining companies.

A few years ago, the thought of moving to one of Africa's poorest country in search of work would have seemed unthinkable for most Portuguese, particularly given the bitter legacy of the colonial period.

And if there were any doubts of where future opportunities lay, Portugal's Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho sent a stark message in 2011.

The prime minister may have been talking about teachers, but it was clear that the invitation to leave extended to people in other fields of work.

Thousands are heeding his advice. Several factors, beyond a shared language, have made Mozambique particularly attractive.

Despite Mr Dias' complaints, the cost of living is much lower than in Angola, where the capital - Luanda - was, until recently, the most expensive city in the world.

There is also a perception that Mozambique's growth rate and stable government make it a good place to start a business.

"With these new discoveries, and with the influx of foreigners here, people will start to spend more and they will want to eat in better restaurants and try different types of food," says Portuguese restaurateur Marcos Silva, who opened an upmarket fish restaurant a Maputo a year ago.

Mr Silva studied interior design in his native country but decided to pursue his passion for food.

In keeping with local laws that cap the number of foreigners working in a company, Mr Silva's partner and manager are both Portuguese, while the rest of the staff - who deal with kitchen and orderly duties - are Mozambicans.

Mr Silva is quick to reject any suggestion that this is an unfair power dynamic.

"It should be seen as an advantage, not as a conquest," he insists. "At the end of the day, it is a niche waiting to be developed. It is a leap of faith we are taking."

Mr Silva's desire to stress this is, perhaps, unsurprising given the Portuguese history in Mozambique.

The former colonial master benefited from slave trading in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Portuguese rule was often heavy handed in the 20th Century. Mozambicans had few rights and were barred from highly skilled and managerial positions until the years immediately preceding independence.

Tense relations and local discontent sparked the military coup which brought independence.

Charles Mangwiro, a Maputo-based journalist at Radio Mozambique, was a baby when Mozambique gained independence. But, since childhood, his parents have told him about the indignities that befell them and fellow Mozambicans under colonial rule.

"My parents say the way the Portuguese spoke to us was insulting and they treated people like they were from a lower class."

Turning his attention to the new generations of Portuguese settlers, Mr Mangwiro says local reaction to the influx has changed within a few years.

"At first they were unwelcome because of concerns they would take jobs," he says.

"It's mainly unskilled work - in shops, for example - but it means locals can get money and keep their families running," he says.

Mr Mangwiro says the spike in Portuguese settlers began about four years ago. He says Chinese workers came next, mainly constructing roads and buildings - transforming the capital's skyline. Brazilians and Indians are also coming in droves, he observes.

Although most Portuguese base themselves in Maputo, some - like Susana Vidal - have gone further afield to benefit from Mozambique's growing tourism sector.

The 39 syear-old, who has a master's degree in tourism, left her Algarve home for a life in the coastal Mozambique town of Vilanculos four years ago after a three-month job hunt in her native country ended in failure.

Ms Vidal divides her time between her job at a tourist lodge and working with her British boyfriend, who has set up a kite-surfing school.

She says local tourism is growing thanks to secluded beaches that are relatively untouched.

"I go home every year and every time I have to come back after two weeks to my little paradise. It's a good feeling to be here.

"We don't plan to go to Portugal or the UK to start a family. That's a good indication that we feel happy here."

More Children in Greece Are Going Hungry

Angelos Tzortzinis for The International Herald Tribune

By LIZ ALDERMAN

Published: April 17, 2013 360 Comments

ATHENS — As an elementary school principal, Leonidas Nikas is used to seeing children play, laugh and dream about the future. But recently he has seen something altogether different, something he thought was impossible in Greece: children picking through school trash cans for food; needy youngsters asking playmates for leftovers; and an 11-year-old boy, Pantelis Petrakis, bent over with hunger pains

Readers’ Comments

Readers shared their thoughts on this article.

Read All Comments (360) »

“He had eaten almost nothing at home,” Mr. Nikas said, sitting in his cramped school office near the port of Piraeus, a working-class suburb of Athens, as the sound of a jump rope skittered across the playground. He confronted Pantelis’s parents, who were ashamed and embarrassed but admitted that they had not been able to find work for months. Their savings were gone, and they were living on rations of pasta and ketchup.

“Not in my wildest dreams would I expect to see the situation we are in,” Mr. Nikas said. “We have reached a point where children in Greece are coming to school hungry. Today, families have difficulties not only of employment, but of survival.”

The Greek economy is in free fall, having shrunk by 20 percent in the past five years. The unemployment rate is more than 27 percent, the highest in Europe, and 6 of 10 job seekers say they have not worked in more than a year. Those dry statistics are reshaping the lives of Greek families with children, more of whom are arriving at schools hungry or underfed, even malnourished, according to private groups and the government itself.

Last year, an estimated 10 percent of Greek elementary and middle school students suffered from what public health professionals call “food insecurity,” meaning they faced hunger or the risk of it, said Dr. Athena Linos, a professor at the University of Athens Medical School who also heads a food assistance program at Prolepsis, a nongovernmental public health group that has studied the situation. “When it comes to food insecurity, Greece has now fallen to the level of some African countries,” she said.

Unlike those in the United States, Greek schools do not offer subsidized cafeteria lunches. Students bring their own food or buy items from a canteen. The cost has become insurmountable for some families with little or no income. Their troubles have been compounded by new austerity measures demanded by Greece’s creditors, including higher electricity taxes and cuts in subsidies for large families. As a result, parents without work are seeing their savings and benefits rapidly disappear.

“All around me I hear kids saying: ‘My parents don’t have any money. We don’t know what we are going to do,’ ” said Evangelia Karakaxa, a vivacious 15-year-old at the No. 9 junior high school in Acharnes.

Acharnes, a working-class town among the mountains of Attica, was bustling with activity from imports until the economic crisis wiped out thousands of factory jobs.

Now, several of Evangelia’s classmates are frequently hungry, she said, and one boy recently fainted. Some children were starting to steal for food, she added. While she does not excuse it, she understands their plight. “Those who are well fed will never understand those who are not,” she said.

“Our dreams are crushed,” added Evangelia, whose parents are unemployed but who is not in the same dire situation as her peers. She paused, then continued in a low voice. “They say that when you drown, your life flashes before your eyes. My sense is that in Greece, we are drowning on dry land.”

Alexandra Perri, who works at the school, said that at least 60 of the 280 students suffered from malnutrition. Children who once boasted of sweets and meat now talk of eating boiled macaroni, lentils, rice or potatoes. “The cheapest stuff,” Ms. Perri said.

This year the number of malnutrition cases jumped. “A year ago, it wasn’t like this,” Ms. Perri, said, fighting back tears. “What’s frightening is the speed at which it is happening.”

The government, which initially dismissed the reports as exaggerations, recently acknowledged that it needed to tackle the issue of malnutrition in schools. But with priorities placed on repaying bailout funds, there is little money in Greek coffers to cope.

Mr. Nikas, the principal, said he knew that the Greek government was laboring to fix the economy. Now that talk of Greece’s exiting the euro zone has disappeared, things look better to the outside world. “But tell that to the family of Pantelis,” he said. “They don’t feel the improvement in their lives.”

In the family’s darkened apartment near the school, Themelina Petrakis, Pantelis’s mother, opened her refrigerator and cupboards one recent weekend. Inside was little more than a few bottles of ketchup and other condiments, some macaroni and leftovers from a meal she had gotten from the town hall.

Mr. Petrakis with his wife, Themelina, and their son Kostas.

The family was doing well and was even helping others in need until last year. The Petrakises were able to afford a spacious apartment with a flat-screen TV and a PlayStation.

Then her husband, Michalis, 41, was laid off from his shipping job in December. He said the company had not paid his wages for five months before that. The couple could no longer afford rent, and by February they had run out of money.

“When the principal called, I had to tell him, ‘We don’t have food,’ ” said Ms. Petrakis, 36, cradling Pantelis’s head as he cast his eyes to the ground.

Mr. Petrakis said he felt emasculated after repeatedly failing to find new work. When food for the family ran low, he stopped eating almost entirely, and rapidly lost weight.

“When I was working last summer, I even threw away excess bread,” he said, tears streaming down his face. “Now, I sit here with a war running through my head, trying to figure out how we will live.”

When the hunger comes, Ms. Petrakis has a solution. “It’s simple,” she said. “You get hungry, you get dizzy and you sleep it off.”

A 2012 Unicef report showed that among the poorest Greek households with children, more than 26 percent had an “economically weak diet.” The phenomenon has hit immigrants hardest but is spreading quickly among Greeks in urban areas where one or both parents are effectively permanently unemployed.

In rural areas, people can at least grow food. But that is not enough to eradicate the problem. An hour’s drive northwest of Athens, in the industrial town of Asproprigos, Nicos Tsoufar, 42, stared vacantly ahead as he sat in the middle school that his three children attend. The school receives lunches from a program run by Prolepsis, the public health group. Mr. Tsoufar said his children desperately needed the meals.

He has not found work for three years. Now, he said, his family is living on what he called a “cabbage-based diet,” which it supplements by foraging for snails in nearby fields. “I know you can’t cover nutritional basics with cabbage,” he said bitterly. “But there’s no alternative.”

The government and groups like Prolepsis are doing what they can. Last year, Prolepsis started a pilot program providing a sandwich, fruit and milk at 34 public schools where more than half of the 6,400 families participating said they had experienced “medium to serious hunger.”

After the program, that percentage dropped to 41 percent. Financed by an $8 million grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, an international philanthropic organization, the program was expanded this year to cover 20,000 children at 120 schools.

Konstantinos Arvanitopoulos, Greece’s education minister, said the government had secured European Union financing to provide fruit and milk in schools, and vouchers for bread and cheese. It is also working with the Greek Orthodox Church to provide thousands of care packages. “It is the least we can do in this difficult financial circumstance,” he said.

Mr. Nikas, the principal at 11-year-old Pantelis’s school, has taken matters into his own hands and is organizing food drives at the school. He is angry at what he sees as broader neglect of Greece’s troubles by Europe.

“I’m not saying we should just wait for others to help us,” he said. “But unless the European Union acts like this school, where families help other families because we’re one big family, we’re done for.”

Portugal's unemployed heading to Mozambique 'paradise'

Related Stories

More Children in Greece Are Going Hungry

By LIZ ALDERMAN

Published: April 17, 2013 360 Comments

Readers’ Comments