By Dennis Gaboury | Founder, Chair, Board of Trustees
Over the past several years, we at Zimkids have become increasingly concerned about how to foster the creativity of the children. That’s not an easy task in a country where kids are trained to memorize, copy and repeat, where artisans tend to churn out dozens of identical sculptures and paintings to sell to visiting tourists, and when sidewalk vendors all sell tomatoes, onions and cabbage.
Given the absence of employment, and thus the need to be creative in devising ways to make a living, we encourage the Zimkids to draw outside the lines and think outside the box.
To do so, we’re working on a three-pronged project with both a personal development and vocational emphasis. The first prong mimics what is done in many American science camps like Camp Invention, where young people are taught to build robots and to make plastic birds fly. Tinashe, our director, just took our first steps in that direction by working with a group of children to motorize one of the wire cars that Zimbabwean children build for their own entertainment. Children here always push their cars or trucks with sticks. They might have seen motorized machine-made toys. But they have never seen or imagined motorizing their own creations. Next step? Small robots, animals and robots so that they will simultaneously explore the artistic and the scientific. We’re currently writing grant applications to bring trainers from the U.S. for this prong and the other prongs. The second prong is geared toward our youngest children and thus is irrelevant to vocational training. But the final one is entirely oriented in that direction. We recently hired a terrific artisan to work with the young people to make wire cars and figures, to build cars out of tin cans, and imagining how to use other scrap materials to CREATE. And those creations are not only marketable, but when combined with new technology have serious potential to CHANGE the market.
They’ve been turning out some amazing creations, either small scale ones out of wire and shredded cans or larger ones welded out of scrap metal.
In the meantime we are finishing up a chicken coop that will provide income and food for the center,
We think we’re on the cusp of striking a major blow to gender expectations in Zimbabwe. (Okay, it’s not a MAJOR blow, but it’s an advance). Early Childhood Education is perhaps the only fast-growing field of endeavor since government has mandated that all children have a year of education before Grade 1. Virtually every certified early childhood educator in the country is female, and we’ve been searching for the right boy to send for training for our preschool. We think we’ve found the ideal candidate brave enough to cross the gender divide!
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By Dennis Gaboury | Founder, Chair, Board of Trustees
By Dennis Gaboury | Founder, Chair, Board of Trustees
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