The Sand Dune That Built a Career

If I ever want to impress people and create an awkward silence, I mention that I built a resort in Africa at the age of 25.

Fresh out of the Peace Corps and completely naïve, my partner (age 21) and I thought it would be a great idea to buy beachfront property in Pemba, Mozambique, and build a resort. Ha! That took a while.

To set the scene: we were literally living in a tent at a backpackers’ hostel while “shopping” for property. Eventually, we found a stretch of untouched coastline — and I mean no one on this beach — on the Indian Ocean. Reality check: it was a sand dune. But it was our sand dune.

We had no idea what we were doing, but ignorance is bliss, so we jumped in. For the first three years, we bounced between California and Cape Town, working to earn money and hauling it back to Mozambique for very glamorous purchases like a borehole. (If you don’t know what that is — I didn’t either — it’s a very deep, very narrow well that you drop a pump into.)

The next year, we built a guard house to protect… nothing. Remember, it was still just a sand dune with a deep hole. But progress is progress.

Eventually, we found a family friend willing to invest, I took a job as Founding Headmistress of the International School of Pemba (more on that another time), and we moved there permanently. We lived in the aldea until we finally got electricity to the site — no small feat in rural Mozambique — and then moved into our tiny guard house while we built our first real home.

It was my first major build, and I learned everything from the ground up — literally. We had no heavy equipment, no power tools (except for a drill I brought from South Africa), and a local crew who knew even less than we did. But we found an incredible makuti roofer (a palm-leaf thatch roof) and, a year later, we had a house. Hands in mortar, fingers full of splinters, standing in the sand and the sun — and I was hooked.

That build sparked my love for construction and project management. I learned electricity, plumbing, and septic systems — we even tested our septic run with a pair of wet wool socks to make sure it worked (and it did!). From there, we added bungalows, a bar

and restaurant, a multilevel building around the water tower, and finally a swimming pool. I used a Building Standards and Code book and the Barefoot Architect in combination with SketchUp to teach myself how to engineer something that would stand safely, be functional in the tropics and aesthetically pleasing.

Building a round infinity pool in remote northern Mozambique was a logistical mission. Cement shortages, power outages that lasted months — we faced it all. When the country ran out of cement, we just switched projects. When the north lost electricity for three months, we kept going.

If we needed wood, we’d find a guy “in the bush” to fell and mill a tree, dry it ourselves (in the tropics!), then bring it to a Swiss expat with a planer before turning it into furniture. I designed every piece, and my friend Danune — who started as an apprentice carpenter — ended up building our entire resort.

As more lodges began popping up, other owners asked me to manage their builds. That’s when I realized how much I’d grown — from clueless backpacker to full-fledged builder and project manager.

Those two young dreamers managed to build something pretty extraordinary on a sand dune by the sea. And that’s where my journey in construction truly began.