Humana People-to-People Alert

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Britta’s story
Britta Junge, TG 1980-1995

As told to Tvind Alert

I was 19 when I first got involved in 1977. In Denmark in those days, it was normal for students to have a ‘gap year’. Some people went to Christiania and just smoked marijuana – Tvind offered a modern alternative, something with a purpose. I wanted to travel, to go out and see the world. Home was so boring. I just wanted to get away. I was ready for adventure.

With a friend, I went to a big meeting at Tvind in Ulfborg. There were 200 people there. I decided right away ‘this is it’, and signed on to join the September Team. I would spend two months preparing, four months travelling, and three months on follow up back in Denmark.

We left in a convoy of ten old broken-down buses, to travel overland to New Delhi, going through Turkey and Afghanistan – the classic overland trail. I have to admit it was not easy. For the first two months we hardly slept, we were working day and night to repair the buses, fundraising, cooking, cleaning and getting ready to leave. It was an incredible trip.

I didn’t meet Amdi Petersen personally then. He was ‘on the scene’ - this was the time the big windmill was being built at Ulfborg. He was very involved with that.

When I got back I was persuaded to stay and join the ‘continuation programme’ – that meant I would stay and keep involved with Tvind for another 8 months, without making any commitment. Some of my friends from that time were sufficiently ‘boiled up’ when they got back to join the Teachers Group straight away, but I wasn’t so sure.

I went to work in a slaughterhouse in Denmark for five months. The idea was to experience working class life as it really was. I was one of 12 women packing ham for the USA. Then I went back to Tvind for an ‘international period’. I went to Chicago, where they were holding elections for the City Mayor – we canvassed with a local community group on behalf of one of the candidates. It is the only time I remember Tvind getting involved in real politics.

In those days, the money was pretty straight-forward. Tvind was not yet rejected by the Danish government. Our student courses at Tvind were subsidised by the state – of course, Tvind got the money direct. Our pay from the slaughterhouse we sent direct to Tvind. Money wasn’t important, though oddly enough, one thing we did learn was exactly how to plan a proper budget, as if we were being manipulated into agreeing to the Common Economy in the Teachers Group.

I still hadn’t joined the Teachers Group. At the end of 1978 I was invited to go and help with UFF in Odense, Denmark’s third-biggest city. UFF (clothes collecting) had only recently started, and I think the idea was that if I wasn’t going to join the Teachers Group, then at least I could do something useful by helping with UFF.

That was when I was invited to meet Amdi – in 1979. I had been on a skiing trip to Norway with some friends and Amdi wanted to see us when we got back because we had confirmed that we were interested in joining the Teachers Group. I was very surprised.

We were going to formally join the Teachers Group. The normal procedure was for a new member to have a meeting with one of the Tvind ‘Distribution Group’ –
Kirsten Larsen, Amdi Petersen, Bodil Ross Sørensen or Gretha Flintegaard. You would listen to a prepared speech, and then go away and think about it. We had to come back within a few days with a decision.

At that time the first step was usually a two year probation period of two years, followed by a second ceremony when you would undertake to join the Teachers group for an indefinite period, if you wanted to. I agreed to the two years.

We were invited to join a working trip helping to renovate a Tvind ship near Malaga, in Spain, where the ceremony was to take place. About 100 people were initiated into the TG that time. Afterwards there was a kind of jobs market – jobs in the TG were written up on bits of paper and pasted up all round the hall, so you could choose. It was incredible. It was like a supermarket of possibilities.

I chose to become supervisor of a group that would go to Zimbabwe as soon as the country was liberated from white supremacist rule. And after that, I hitch-hiked straight home to Denmark.

In 1979, Zimbabwe was not yet free. While we waited, our team went to Turkey for a few months to get ready to go to Zimbabwe. It was called The School for Politics and Skills. We thought Turkey would be a similar developing country where we could learn our new role. We were in Turkey the day Zimbabwe got independence – I remember the headline in a Turkish newspaper.

When we got to Zimbabwe, we worked to set up schools for returning refugees. I was in Zimbabwe for eight years (1980-88). It was hard work, the first two or three years were very rough – we lived, ate and slept like the local people, just eating the same food and sleeping on rush mats – we didn’t have proper beds. It was years before we moved into a proper house – we built it ourselves. For the first four years, I was in a team constructing a technical school, then for the next four I was country leader.

It was a fantastic time. But oddly one of the things that I remember most was the kind of racism the Africans had towards us. They were used to seeing white faces – white farmers in control. Now suddenly there were a lot of new white people around and they found that difficult to handle. They couldn’t cope with their own freedom. For years they used to call us ‘The Dirty Danes’. The students and teachers were reluctant to participate in what we were doing or work for the school. Once there was a full scale riot and we had to run away into the bush. We spent a long time discussing these contradictions….

Financially, we were not well off. We were poor and the projects were poor. We didn’t receive a salary. Our expenses were covered, and it gradually became a system – annual travel to our home country, annual clothes and symbolic pocket money. Funds and foreign currency in Zimbabwe were thin and had been for years, so there was hardly any money for anything.

It was during this time that the Teachers Group started to go to other countries in southern Africa, like Mozambique, where there were much more opportunities for funding and hard currency. The war in Mozambique was going on and foreign aid agencies were trying to do a lot in the country. It was during the late 1980s that DAPP first got involved in Mozambique selling old clothes, because part of Frelimo had started importing and selling old clothes from Europe in the country.

It was a secret at first that the clothes brought down from Europe were sold and not given away. Later it was agreed that it could be admitted. Clothes sales to DAPP in Zambia, -Namibia, -Zimbabwe, ADPP in Guinea-Bissau, -Angola and -Mozambique rocketed during the late 80s and 90s, for example the amount of clothes to the mentioned countries went up from 500 tons a year to 5000 tons a year in a very short space of time. Clothes sales became a major source of funding for Tvind projects in southern Africa.

It was in Mozambique that the technique was spearheaded of changing second hand clothes sold in the country to hard currency – dollars. It started with a construction company started in Mozambique by a Teachers Group member called Jens Otto Laustsen. The ADPP Mozambique construction company would do development work for the government and the World Bank and other big organisations and get paid in hard currency. After that, the idea came to use the second hand clothes trade to eran hard currency in the same way. And the same sort of thing started happening, in Angola, and on a smaller scale in Zimbabwe, Zambia and other African countries.

In 1988, I went to work for ADPP in Angola. The situation in Angola was dramatically different because of the oil reserves in the country and the presence of big international oil companies, like Conoco. Suddenly there was the possibility of making a lot of real development work, with funds available to pay for it. I went to Cabinda, the oil-rich enclave, to work with the American oil company Chevron. My job was to work with the Angolan ministry of energy and Chevron to establish projects – although that one was not successful, a big range of other projects were receiving money from oil companies.

This situation gave us a lot of access to hard currency instead of Angolan local currency. For example, an oil company like Conoco would get interested in helping to sponsor development work. It would want to employ an ADPP person on a salary paid for in dollars out of its special projects budget. We saw how they used the hard currency in Mozambique, and we started to do the same.

The idea to use salaries as a way of getting hard currency really came from Denmark. This was a time – the early 1990s – when Tvind in Denmark was really coming under a lot of pressure from the Danish government because of the huge subsidies it was getting. Funds in Denmark were really drying up, so Amdi Petersen got the idea that project leaders in Africa ought to be paid in hard currency, which would give the Teachers Group a lot more money. The funds would be available if we looked for them, he said.

As much hard currency as possible had to be sent back to the Teachers Group in Denmark. So that’s what we did. When Amdi realised that it was possible for Humana to actually employ project leaders and draw a salary on the head of each, he started to do that too.

It was about this time Amdi developed a plan called “Five, Ten, Fifteen, Twenty”. It meant a target of five million croner the first year, ten million croner the second, and so on, in hard currency which was supposed to be sent back from Africa to the Teachers Group. The first year was 1993. We all had to work incredibly hard to achieve this plan, which left us all utterly exhausted.

I was in charge of the accounts in Angola. In the beginning, the hard currency would be money we had directly earned in salaries. Later on, it was local currency exchanged into hard currency. We did it through the second hand clothes, like in Mozambique. The money we earned from selling the clothes in Angola and Mozambique would cover core expenses for the development projects within those countries and an amount agreed upon (about 75-80% of earnings from the sale of second hand clothes) would just be exchanged for hard currency, either internally, or at a bank, so it would be available for the Teachers Group covering the salaries for the Teacher Groups staff in Africa. Did we have a donation in hard currency and some of the costs from that donation could be spent in local currency, we would set aside an equivalent bit of hard currency to cover salaries on behalf of the staff in Africa for the Teachers Group.

This is how it would work. ADPP would start, say, a fishing company in Angola. The fishing company would have to have nets and boats and so on. A big oil company like Conoco would offer to help sponsor the deal and they would give, say, $100,000, in hard currency.

The money would be split three ways. About $50,000 might be actually used on the project. About $25,000 might go on salaries to the ADPP project leaders – of course, that would go straight to Denmark. Then there would be another quarter – say $25,000 in running costs and expenses, which was possible to be spent locally in local currency. The local currency would be supplied by the ‘second-hand clothes fund’. In that way ADPP in Angola would be able to exchange local currency (earned from selling second hand clothes) to hard currency which was needed to cover staff salaries to be sent to the Teachers Group.

In reality, that $25,000 in hard currency would also go back to Denmark. It would not be spent in Angola at all. The money in local currency to keep the project going would really come from somewhere else. The $25,000 had been funded twice so there was a hidden surplus. It never showed clearly in the books and nobody noticed it. You just told Conoco you had spent all $100,000 on the project.

Sometimes hard currency for ADPP never even arrived in Angola – it was just transferred straight to an ADPP account in Denmark.

As more and more tons of old clothes were sent to Angola from Europe, so more and more money could be converted to hard currency. In 1995, Angola received about 2000 tons of clothes from Humana/UFF in Europe. The 2000 tons were a donation from ADPP and Humana. They were sold locally at, say, from 50 cents to 75 cents a kilo – a profit of something like $500,000 in local currency. Half would be spent on projects, but the other half would be converted to hard currency to cover ‘salaries’ – in US cash.

By 1995, around $30,000 a week in surplus hard currency was being sent back from Angola to Denmark.

Often, the money was converted into hard currency at a bank in Luanda and transferred to Denmark by money order, to a Teachers Group account at the Bikuben bank in Fredericia.

Occasionally it was taken from Africa to Denmark in cash. I travelled from Angola to Denmark two or three times in 1994 and again in 1995, with something like $30,000 in cash in my ‘stomach purse’. I had to give the money to Niels Peter Holst in Vejle. He was a member of the Teachers Group who knew both sides of the operation – the work in Africa and the Teachers group economy. He took the money and did whatever he had to do with it.

The same kind of “hard-currency-trick” was being used all over Africa in DAPP, although much less so in Zimbabwe, Zambia and countries like Namibia where there was very little opportunity for earning hard currency. It worked well in Mozambique with the construction company, because so many aid agencies wanted to work there. And the old clothes was good business.

It also started working to an extent with farms and plantations in Angola, Zimbabwe and Guinea Bissau – but that is a much more long term project with not so much investment from outside. The Teachers group started thinking about it as a way of getting an income other than clothes.

Humana closed its Danish headquarters in Vejle in 1996? – the Teachers group decided it was no longer a good thing to stay in Denmark and moved its world headquarters to Zimbabwe. Amdi chose Zimbabwe apprearently because it was a more professional and civilised place at the time than most of the other countries, where it was easier to get around and get things done.

I’m sure that most of the hard currency moved from Africa to the Teachers Group went towards buying the luxury apartments in Fisher Island and the expensive flats in Miami for high up people in the Teachers Group. But looking back on it, the years 1992 and 1993 were when Five, Ten, Fifteen, Twenty was started and the years when Tvind was buying Fisher Island.
(above to be taken out as this is not really my first hand knowledge)!!!!!!!

None of us knew much about Maima and luxury apartments in Fisher Island at the time. Rikke Viholm talked about apartments, but we didn’t see any photographs. We didn’t realise how expensive they were. Some of us knew something about Plagborgvej in Grindsted – the expensive luxury property in Denmark that Amdi is living in, it was a place that only a few selected people ever got to visit. We just thought the Teachers Group knew how to use the money best – full stop. The money would be invested in the projects. It was something you had to agree with.

Towards the end of my time in the Teacher’s Group, it was no longer pleasant. There was no opportunity to develop myself. I began to realise that the Teachers Group was not a community of equal people. Some people were more equal than others. Then there were the funny little gifts that some people got as they rose up. A pair of Cartier sunglasses, a Mont Blanc fountain pen, a smart silk blouse. I never got as far as the inscribed Teachers Group watch. I realised I was being bought off by little material things. I felt very uncomfortable.

Finally, I left in 1995 – keeping up with all those plans was incredibly hard work and very stressful. It was always fulfil this plan, achieve that, and if necessary make other people’s lives hell. In the end, I didn’t like the person I became. I left the Teachers Group after 15 years came back to Europe. Betrayed? Not quite – but disappointed, and very confused.

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Britta Junge is now a special needs teacher in Jutland, Denmark. She has appeared in the television programmes that led to the prosecution and the trial for embezzlement of Amdi Petersen and seven other senior members of the Teachers Group Economy.

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