By Dennis Gaboury | Founder, Chair, Board of Trustees
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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