By Dennis Gaboury | Founder, Chair, Board of Trustees
These past few months have been exhausting at Zimkids as Dennis and the older boys finished up a new preschool building that will allow us to obtain a permanent license even as Samantha and Sithabisiwe taught the little ones in our Resource Centre, and Tinashe and Philip enlisted our older girls to help them run the camps that we always hold during school breaks.
The construction had been in the planning for almost 18 months, and we found ourselves tangled in the usual bureaucratic inefficiency that often exists to force people to pay bribes. We finally broke things loose about eight months ago, and then the boys pushed themselves to the limit moving tons of rock to fill the foundation, building the walls, roofing, tiling, painting and building all the furniture.
Was it worth it? Take a peek at the attached photos. Bulawayo has never seen a preschool anything like this!
Even in the midst of the construction chaos, our older girls have been befriended by girls clubs at two U.S. high schools, and we’re hoping that catching a glimpse of more emboldened peers will help them glimpse new possibilities and find the strength to push at the boundaries of the acceptable.
And this week, we start serious tutoring for the annual national Grade 7 and Ordinary Level (high school) exams, which begin in October. They are the terror of every school kid in the country, and we decided that focused tutoring might reduce the fear – and improve their skills. Fortunately, we have two very able tutors in Washington, who is also our caretaker, and his sister, who just passed her Ordinary Level exams with some of the highest scores in the region.
As usual, we cope daily with heartbreak: Children forced to drop out of school by their families, whole communities pressuring 16-year-old girls into early marriage, and routine exploitation.
One of our favorite little boys, 11-year-old Mthoko, lived for several years here with his grandmother and younger sister. Then, relatives in his rural area snatched him and took him home to herd cattle and goats. When they stopped feeding him, he ran away and a month ago made his way 50 miles back to Bulawayo. At that point, we gave his grandmother the bus fare to go to the village to try to wrest the younger sister away from the relatives, who were turning her into their servant. She didn’t succeed, and we now have learned that the rural relatives plan to grab Mthoko again. This time, however, we are ready for the fight since Philip, our program director, has secured his license as a social worker, which gives him both authority and direct access to child protective services.
We struggle on, then, buoyed by our successes and by your generosity. At the moment, we’re bracing for an onslaught of need since the government here has announced it will introduce “bond notes” into the economy, what seems to be a backhanded way to take us back to Zimbabwe dollars and, inevitably, catastrophic inflation.
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