By Dennis Gaboury | Founder, Chair, Board of Trustees
Our older girls are soaring – and we are unabashedly proud of their achievements. Thamani and Hloniphile have just finished a course that led to their certification as nurses’ aides – and they will begin working at the central hospital in January. They are certainly the only nurse aides who can also weld, lay brick and build shelves!
Sithabisiwe finished her training and is now a certified counselor. She was the youngest in her class - and the only one in her class to have completed the year long course. Samantha, who runs our preschool, also defied age barriers, receiving her certification as an early childhood educator at age 19. Pauline, who finished her Advanced Level high school diploma thanks to the financial support of Zimkids, also completed her early childhood course.
Our girls continue learning to weld, lay brick and block, plaster and paint as part of our construction skills training, and we plan to keep our cohort of recent high school graduates busy with hands-on training as we break ground for the preschool classroom we are about to build.
Not all of our plans go entirely smoothly, and the details demonstrate some of the challenges we face. Several years ago, we conceived the idea of a sewing center that would both train some of our older young people and provide income to Zimkids through the construction and sale of school uniforms. Unfortunately, the two girls chosen to lead the effort, who we sent for courses in sewing, cutting and patternmaking, proved too passive to launch the project, and one of their caregivers tried to insert herself into the activity. We’re currently looking for the right girls to replace them, but we realized how much more effort we need to put into helping these young people to be proactive and to think outside of the box.
I should end with a special New Year Shout-out to all of our amazing donors. We have now received financial assistance from more than 2,000 of you, and without that help, we could never have gotten that far. Consider that the group of we think of as our Texas gogos (grandmothers) made over 200 quilts and bought new underwear for our kids, as well as furnishing the sewing center with sewing and overlock machines, along with thread, scissors, fabric and patterns. A group of young people in Plano, Texas made 50 fleece blankets for our preschoolers. The Buckner Foundation gave Zimkids shoes for all our kids. And our wonderfully generous friends from the P&G alumni network have, time and again, provided us with the funds necessary to build the structures we need for our vocational projects.
We end 2014 optimistic that we’re moving in the right direction because every day we see our children growing stronger, in body and in spirit. We at Zimkids wish you the happiest of new years with bottomless gratitude for making ours so bright.
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