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 our girls 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.
Take a look at the girls’ first attempts at wire/beaded and or shredded metal can Christmas ornaments, whether small trees, Santas, cars, or bicycles.
Many of our older girls are too busy preparing for their final Ordinary level examinations to be involved in much beyond our tutoring program that we hope will help them pass – especially the much-dreaded math exam.
But almost all of them are involved with a new garden project that will provide vegetables for our internal use and for the families of the neediest children. Involving them in more modern gardening techniques is another way to provide them with a bit of a safety net. For the past several years, Zimbabwe has experienced terrible droughts that have dramatically increased food insecurity even in urban areas since almost everyone keeps a tiny plot of vegetables. At Zimkids, the girls learn how to use drip irrigation to reduce the amount water needed for gardening, low-cost shading materials and composting.
So we’re moving, more slowly than we would like, of course. But given the circumstances on the ground in Zimbabwe, some days we are surprised that we’re able to move forward at all!
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By Dennis Gaboury | Founder, Chair, Board of Trustees
By Dennis Gaboury | Founder, Chair, Board of Trustees
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