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 children are trained to memorize, copy and repeat, and where artisans tend to churn out dozens of identical sculptures and paintings to sell to visiting tourists.
We’ve tried encouraging the Zimkids to draw outside the lines, to imagine fantasy worlds, with limited success. But now we have an entirely new vision of how to proceed and we are excited to share our plan with you since we believe that it will nurture our kids in entirely new ways.
Have any of you sent a child to a science camp like Camp Invention, where young people are taught to build robots and to make plastic birds fly? For American children, such experiences are terrific, but for Zimbabwean children, such experiences are beyond the realm of imagination. And that is precisely why we are beginning to build our own approach to Camp Invention starting with the creation of wire figures wrapped in strips from soda cans.
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.
That’s where we are starting, and we plan to move on to small robots, animals and robots so that they will simultaneously explore the artistic and the scientific.
We are currently preparing grant applications to scale up this step by bringing a trainer from Camp Invention or a similar organization both to work with our children and to train older Zimkids and staff to serve as camp counselors. They will thus be able to offer regular “camps” to our kids and to reach out to the wider community for special camps that will generate income for them and for Zimkids.
Step 2 will be geared toward our youngest children, the preschool kids, who are trapped pretty firmly in the rigid curriculum mandated by the Ministry of Education. But during holidays and weekends, we are free to broaden their learning, and we plan to do so by bringing to Zimbabwe an amazing preschool teacher who has been a firm supporter of Zimkids. As with Camp Invention, we plan to have the teacher work with the children directly and with our staff so that her programs can continue.
Finally, while we already have a terrific artisan working with the children on the wire cars and figures, on building cars out of tin cans, and imagining how to use other scrap materials to CREATE, we hope to bring in a professional from South Africa to challenge them further.
So please keep your fingers crossed for us in our search for grant money. Our children are confined by traditional expectations and traditional ways of thinking. We’re about to make a major push to open their minds and let their imaginations flow.
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