The past few weeks at Zimkids have been exciting, so let me try to boil it all down:
The big news: Across Zimbabwe, only 18.4 percent of high school students passed their national exams, but 70 percent of our Zimkids prevailed. Those results were deeply satisfying, as you can imagine. All that tutoring, encouragement and training really paid off. We are paying for those students continue to the second level of secondary school – Advanced Level.
One of the others, Samantha, is running a new program we began for three to six year olds who are with us every day 9am to 3pm. This program offers a nutritional support component using a high-nutrient supplement that is receiving rave reviews in South Africa. The latest, and littlest, Zimkids, are already learning English, reading and taking their first tentative steps onto computers.
Our vegetable garden was suddenly overrun with army worms in January which ate everything in sight in a matter of hours. So we have replanted and consulted with agricultural people on ways to combat the worms. We now are growing chimulia (kale), spinach, tomatoes and onions.
Tinashe is busier than ever in the Tech Center, continuing his training with the older children even as he begins training both the small newcomers, including some three-year-olds, and the caregivers, including 80 year-old grandmothers who have never actually touched a computer.
Go to our website – www.zimkids.com - to see the latest video news or, if you are on facebook you can find the videos on our facebook page www.facebook.com/zimkids.
We’ve made a terrific new alliance with Contact, a local counseling center funded by the German and Greek governments. They will be offering workshops for our staff, for the older children, and the caregivers, and are making their professional staff available when we confront difficult family situations. They run a counseling training program, usually limited to candidates over the age of 25. But they have agreed to include Sithabisiwe, who will begin training part-time in March.
The Center is in beautiful condition, being carefully maintained by its builders. We recently added a roof for shading over the 15 meter art table behind the resource center. Built entirely by former trainees with the help of current ones.
Some wonderful new friends in New York are working on a Bra drive because bras are expensive and in short supply here. We’d also talked about doing something to address the awful problem of the high cost of sanitary napkins. At first, we’d thought about a fundraising drive for reusable pads, but our physician here protested because of the difficulty of keeping them sanitary. Instead, we’re investigating the possibility of borrowing a page from a terrific Indian group that has invented three machines that allow for the creation of a small-scale sanitary napkin factory. The biggest challenge is sourcing the materials needed here. So many businesses are closed or closing, but we’re excited by the possibility of opening a small business that would provide experience, employment, and the cheapest sanitary pads in the country! That would be a wonderful addition to our training program for girls, which is continuing with welding. They are in the midst of welding shelving for our expanded library and storage room. This requires them to plan the size, shape, and height to fit the space so they are getting a lesson in drafting. Then they have to measure and cut the pieces and finally weld so that the shelf is level. The girls are in great need of experience in planning, organizing and administration as we move forward with microenterprises for them. A small factory would certainly provide them with on-the-job training. So as we look into the possibility - we hope the necessary materials can be sourced locally.
We wish to thank those of you who sign up for a monthly recurring donation with GlobalGiving. It assists us so much. Thanks you for your commitment, trust and kindness.
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Happy New Year, friends of Zimkids! We’re gearing up for an amazing new year in Pumula, thanks to your continued support.
Several weeks ago, the new U.S. Ambassador to Zimbabwe, Bruce Wharton, made Zimkids his first stop outside the capital, Harare, following his appointment. Sithabisiwe and Thandi took him on a tour and described the impact that the Zimkids training program had both on them and on the building of the center. The younger children performed and even got him dancing. And the caretakers were extremely generous in their compliments. One grandfather pointed to a welding machine and said, “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. Now, my granddaughter even knows how to use one!”
That night at dinner, Ambassador Wharton told friends that he thought Zimkids should be an international model. Needless to say, Tinashe and the team were extremely pleased!
At the moment, everyone is waiting anxiously for the arrival of the 65 boxes that we shipped thanks to the generosity of the US African Children’s Fellowship, which ships books and other supplies to rural schools. The books we sent – donated by schools in the Catskills and individuals from all over – will more than quintuple the size of our library. We’ll have new equipment for our sports programs. Scores of board games will keep the kids mesmerized when it rains since they’d never seen board games until we brought a few back last year. Scrabble has become the hot competitive “sport,” and fortunately, we’ve shipped plenty of dictionaries!
Three donated sewing machines courtesy of a donor in Texas will allow us to try our hand at a new income-producing projects. And we think that we can train both boys and girls to gain skills and income.
Finally, we’ll be able to ramp up our clinic with a scale, blood pressure cuffs, assorted equipment and a whole range of supplies. Sithabisiwe and Collen have gone through a 3-day First Aid training course, and we’re planning to give them more training so that they can serve as a first line of care in coordination with our private physician. The drought in Bulawayo is so severe water is turned off for 4 days a week. It needs to be boiled and many of our families have no electricity and are forced to burn wood. As a result many of our kids are getting sick. Tinashe has spent the last couple of months ferrying children to our doctor for treatment and we are doing all we can to educate about water borne diseases.
Now that things are organized and running smoothly at the new Center, we’ve begun an intake of new children, concentrating on kids ages 4-10 years. We’ve arranged to purchase a high-nutrition porridge to feed them in the morning. We’re hoping that providing it to the younger children will help their development, both physical and mental.
We have not forgotten our Girl Effect plans, of course, and we plan to use the money we are receiving from the Nike/Globalgiving Challenge to continue training girls to weld and to create the first of what we hope will be the first of several spin-off businesses, ZimGirls Welding.
Many, many thanks to our board of advisors, Ric Keeley in San Francisco, Mzu Ngwenya (Team Siyakha) in London, Gloria Slagle in Fairbanks and Julie Tazzia in Michigan. Their work on behalf of Zimkids has been amazing and wonderful. Also thanks to the Ross School Friends Academy in New York, Andes and Roxbury Central Schools in the Catskills for their generous and welcoming support. And of course, to the thousands of individual donors who through their contributions have made possible a rainbow of opportunities for our orphans.
Dennis is on his way back to Zimbabwe on January 15. Since things are running smoothly without him, he plans to exercise a light touch in the daily operations and concentrate on new initiatives, creating vocational training programs and business management programs.
For Zimkids, then – and we hope for all of you – 2013 promises to be an amazing and productive new year! Thanks to all of you!
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Let me start this update with some general comments:
Things have been very tough in Zimbabwe over the past several months. Last year’s drought pushed up the price of food yet again, and this year’s forecast is for more of the same. The World Food Program is warning of widespread hunger. The drought also left the city in a water crisis that led first to cut-offs of water every other day, then for 72 hours at a time and now for 96 hours off, 24 on. Unfortunately, our new well went dry, so we’ve been scrambling for both water and food.
Nonetheless, we’re thriving. After almost two years of frantic activity to get our new Center built and the programs redesigned to our new realities, we’re finally settling in to a routine. With our own site, and since Pumula schools are on two shifts, we are able to meet with our young people daily. The trainees who built the new facility with Dennis and Tinashe are now managing the Center programs. They are running daily tutoring programs in our library, especially for the teenagers currently sitting their high school graduation examinations. Foster, who is running sports programs, has recruited the older kids to help him build an obstacle course. Tinashe is leading everyone through the complexities of computers, starting, literally from the inside (of the machine) out. And Sithabisiwe and Collin have just completed a First Aid training course and are getting our clinic up and running.
We are about to bring in a group of younger orphans, preschoolers, because we are seeing too many young children wandering the neighborhood without supervision or stimulation – and with dangerously swollen bellies. We’ve recently dealt with a case of full-blown malnutrition with Fiona, a 13 year old who is HIV positive, so we’ve become even more sensitive to signs of serious hunger.
Our big news is that starting on November 1, we’ll be competing in the Girl Effect Challenge sponsored by Nike and Global Giving. It is going to be our toughest challenge since the winning charities will be those with the greatest number of individual donors, not the largest total amount of donations. We’re aiming for 1000, and if we prevail, we’ll be in good shape for funding a special training program for girls that will result in a series of microenterprises that we’ll eventually spin-off for the girls themselves to run and own.
It is enormously important because once girls hit 16 or 17, their caregivers want to marry them off as soon as possible, usually to older men, those most likely to abuse them, to want polygamous marriages and to be HIV positive. So we’d be really grateful if you could throw a bit into the pot at http://www.globalgiving.org/projects/building-girls-futures/
A $10 donation counts as much as a $500 donation!
The Girl Effect program will be an integral part of our vocational training program, which is booming. I don’t know if you can imagine the excitement of young people who don’t even have shoes when they’re presented with the chance to learn on brand new computers! As they master the basics, we’re going to start a community blog about Pumula North, complete with photographs and video. We’re hoping that a few will get hooked and a friend from New York has offered to visit and start them on web design, a skill in growing demand.
And the welding program! We never would have anticipated the sheer passion these young people are showing for welding. Thanks to the U.S. Embassy in Harare, we’ve managed to purchase a second welding machine – and they’re off and running!
We are very fortunate to have been offered a bit of container space by a fantastic foundation in New York, and are about to ship three sewing machines over. They will be used both by our trainees and by some of the caregivers. And we already have both boys and girls asking when they can begin to learn sewing.
We have lots of plans for more programs, including one to prepare young people to serve as home health aids, another in furniture making. Little by little, we tell ourselves…
None of this could have happened, of course, without your help. So thank you!
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