VOCATIONAL TRAINING FOR 200 ZIMBABWEAN ORPHANS

In a country with 94 percent unemployment, every group that works with orphans is dogged by the problem of developing an “exit strategy” for their young charges – and few have succeeded. Zimkids is thus particularly proud that we are not only family, friend and confidante to the young people who have been with us from the beginning and are now finishing high school, but that we have developed programs to train them to open their own businesses and/or in skills that will appeal to the few employers left in the country.

This year alone, a total of eleven people received professional training this year from Zimkids, and we hope that they will follow in the footsteps of Foster and Collen, who received their first training with us in construction and welding and now have entered the workforce installing solar panels and solar hot water heaters for a major company. That’s no small achievement when 40-year-olds with two decades of experience are begging for work! Also, 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.

We sent both Ngqabutho and Zibusiso for training in electrical wiring, and Ngqabutho is about to begin an advanced course, as he will be replacing Foster in maintaining our solar array and electrical infrastructure. He also was trained in plumbing under the guidance of certified plumbers. Even our staff is getting in on the act, with Phillip working on a diploma that will give him a license in social work.

Our welding program continues to thrive and 20 new young people are about to start construction training as part of the construction of a new building for our pre-school. The preschool has proven to be one of our most successful programs, and after our first class “graduated,” neighborhood parents were lining up at our gates requesting places for their children. We realized, then, that we could move toward self-sufficiency by becoming a licensed preschool that would charge non-orphans while accommodating orphans for free. We then sent two of our girls for training and certification as early childhood educators. And we will open both as an independent preschool in January 2016 – and as a certified training center for preschool teachers.

 The building will be constructed, as have ALL our buildings, by vocational trainees. At the beginning of this year, Foster and Collen led the seniors and elders on the construction of our sewing center, which took only one month to complete. New builders emerged from this project and both girls and boys worked tirelessly to ensure that the sewing center was finished on time even as they gained practical building skills.

A vital part of our vocational training is to teach our older kids to pay it forward by helping other younger children. Several months ago, our staff and a group of our Seniors – our oldest Zimkids – went a step further by establishing an outreach program to orphans in a crude settlement for displaced families called Methodist 7 miles from our center in the bush. Sithabisiwe, Nkosikhona, Ngqabutho and Samantha have given their all in trying to help the kids from Methodist, and the outreach program has strengthened everyone’s abilities in communication, teamwork, and planning. We recently distributed shoes to our outreach kids courtesy of the Buckner Foundation.

 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 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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Our vocational training programs are keeping everyone hopping inside the walls of our Center, even as things outside them continue to decay. The economy is once again in steep decline. Businesses continue to close, the government continues to raise taxes and fees in order to pay civil servants, whose wages eat up 75 percent of the national budget. And the news on the AIDS front is grim. The national prevalence rate, long in decline, is inching back up, and Bulawayo’s prevalence rate of almost 22 percent is 50 percent above the national average. Across the country, 1.2 million adults are now living with HIV, a constant reminder of how many new orphans we will need to serve.

We’re working hard to teach our young people to become planners, anticipators and organizers. Raised to a culture in which respect for elders and obedience to authority are the prime values, Zimbabwean youth have no experience in these essential skills. Providing them with such training is at the core of all of our activities, and we’re now ratcheting things up a notch with a new outreach program to young people in a village 15 minutes away, young people who are in even more desperate circumstances than our kids. Our older children are learning to pay it forward and have taken the lead in planning activities with those youngsters, assessing their needs, and calculating how they might help without breaking our budget.

Thanks to a generous donation targeted to health care training, two of our Senior girls have almost finished a nurses’ aide course. They have conducted baseline health screenings of all 200 children and are monitoring them monthly, using a spreadsheet designed by one of our girls who caught the computer “bug.” And the head of the program that trained them has promised to find them employment, a true miracle in a country where unemployment hovers at 90 percent.

Our welding program is soaring, with new designs emerging. Ngqabutho and Zibusiso designed and built fabulous curved shelves for our sewing center - and a visitor was so wowed that he ordered a set for himself!

The new school year begins in January, and December is the month when parents began their search for the required school uniforms for their children. Our new sewing center, then, us buzzing with activity as the girls cut and sew to stockpile for the coming demand. Uniforms are expensive, often hard to find, and available only in town, a $2 trip. We’re keeping our fingers crossed that a lower price and easy availability will give us plenty of orders. Our girls are certainly ready! And we should note that even as they prepare for the uniform season, the girls are also teaching all the children how to sew in the hope that they will at least be able to care for their own meager stocks of clothing.

Our Resource Center is filled with our youngest children, our second class of preschoolers. Two of our Seniors have now finished training in Early Childhood Education, so we are ready to apply for a license – and then open our doors to some paying children to defray costs for our orphans.  The government has stringent requirements about the physical structure of a preschool, so as soon as we find the funds, our crack building team will gear up for a new round of construction – and a new group of trainees, under the guidance of our very own Master Builders, Foster Dingani and Collen Makurumidze, two of our first trainees.

Fortunately, even in this long dry season, our greenhouse is producing a bumper crop of vegetables daily, so we’ll be able to keep their bellies full!

It’s incredibly moving to watch our Zimkids move into adulthood with the tools they need to succeed, with skills and consciences that they’ve developed thanks to your help.

Note on our facebook page /Zimkids that we are now a part of AmazonSmile.  If you click on the AmazonSmile logo on the left side of our facebook page and go to Amazon.smile when you shop Zimkids will receive a donation from Amazon. 

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