Happy New Year, friends of Zimkids! We’re gearing up for an amazing new year in Pumula, thanks to your continued support.
Several weeks ago, the new U.S. Ambassador to Zimbabwe, Bruce Wharton, made Zimkids his first stop outside the capital, Harare, following his appointment. Sithabisiwe and Thandi took him on a tour and described the impact that the Zimkids training program had both on them and on the building of the center. The younger children performed and even got him dancing. And the caretakers were extremely generous in their compliments. One grandfather pointed to a welding machine and said, “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. Now, my granddaughter even knows how to use one!”
That night at dinner, Ambassador Wharton told friends that he thought Zimkids should be an international model. Needless to say, Tinashe and the team were extremely pleased!
At the moment, everyone is waiting anxiously for the arrival of the 65 boxes that we shipped thanks to the generosity of the US African Children’s Fellowship, which ships books and other supplies to rural schools. The books we sent – donated by schools in the Catskills and individuals from all over – will more than quintuple the size of our library. We’ll have new equipment for our sports programs. Scores of board games will keep the kids mesmerized when it rains since they’d never seen board games until we brought a few back last year. Scrabble has become the hot competitive “sport,” and fortunately, we’ve shipped plenty of dictionaries!
Three donated sewing machines courtesy of a donor in Texas will allow us to try our hand at a new income-producing projects. And we think that we can train both boys and girls to gain skills and income.
Finally, we’ll be able to ramp up our clinic with a scale, blood pressure cuffs, assorted equipment and a whole range of supplies. Sithabisiwe and Collen have gone through a 3-day First Aid training course, and we’re planning to give them more training so that they can serve as a first line of care in coordination with our private physician. The drought in Bulawayo is so severe water is turned off for 4 days a week. It needs to be boiled and many of our families have no electricity and are forced to burn wood. As a result many of our kids are getting sick. Tinashe has spent the last couple of months ferrying children to our doctor for treatment and we are doing all we can to educate about water borne diseases.
Now that things are organized and running smoothly at the new Center, we’ve begun an intake of new children, concentrating on kids ages 4-10 years. We’ve arranged to purchase a high-nutrition porridge to feed them in the morning. We’re hoping that providing it to the younger children will help their development, both physical and mental.
We have not forgotten our Girl Effect plans, of course, and we plan to use the money we are receiving from the Nike/Globalgiving Challenge to continue training girls to weld and to create the first of what we hope will be the first of several spin-off businesses, ZimGirls Welding.
Many, many thanks to our board of advisors, Ric Keeley in San Francisco, Mzu Ngwenya (Team Siyakha) in London, Gloria Slagle in Fairbanks and Julie Tazzia in Michigan. Their work on behalf of Zimkids has been amazing and wonderful. Also thanks to the Ross School Friends Academy in New York, Andes and Roxbury Central Schools in the Catskills for their generous and welcoming support. And of course, to the thousands of individual donors who through their contributions have made possible a rainbow of opportunities for our orphans.
Dennis is on his way back to Zimbabwe on January 15. Since things are running smoothly without him, he plans to exercise a light touch in the daily operations and concentrate on new initiatives, creating vocational training programs and business management programs.
For Zimkids, then – and we hope for all of you – 2013 promises to be an amazing and productive new year! Thanks to all of you!