We've just returned from our trip to Zimbabwe--the Teachers Workshop Day on the 3rd of October was exhilarating, soulful and very motivating. You'll be pleased I'm sure to know that I finally got delivery of the parcels--just in time! The only thing missing was 50 erasers--inexplicable, since there were more valuable things in there, but anyway, not tragic.
On the following Monday we made a tour of the other schools in the region which will be part of the expanded project, thanks to the financial support we're getting from the Roger Federer Foundation. The conditions in all of the schools is as dismal as Matopo Primary was in the beginning, with broken windows, 3 to 4 kids sharing dilapidated desks meant for 1 or 2 children, cracked blackboards, a lack of toilets and clean water. But I am always amazed at the discipline, motivation and eagerness to learn and teach that I see every time in Zimbabwe. They may be dressed in rags, but the children stand up straight, look you in the eye and smile! The teachers' pride in what they can accomplish against all odds is humbling and inspiring.
As you may know, I'm trying to recruit teachers here to be pen friends with Matopo teachers. At the Teachers Workshop Day, the queue to sign up for a Swiss pen friend stretched the whole length of the room! Please get in touch with me if you would be interested in corresponding with a Matopo teacher. You needn't be a primary school teacher to take part--everyone is welcome--you don't even have to be from Switzerland.
I've gotten cannier about which activities work well at these Workshops. In previous Workshops, I have always used the idea of stories, especially folk tales, as a springboard for many games and activities. This time we acted out, translated and drew illustrations from some Ndebele tales which some teachers from Matopo had prepared in advance for the Workshop. It was wonderful! I also used a version of one of my favourite childhood stories, "Stone Soup", and it was great fun.
Stay tuned for more developments and please encourage us by leaving a short comment.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Monday, September 14, 2009
slow progress, maybe...plus ETAS SIG Day
Well, the parcels are still sitting in customs in Bulawayo, but some small progress has been made. Several people have initiated action to help us liberate the goods, and with any luck, I will have my materials for the next Teachers Workshop Day on October 5! Please cross your fingers!
We held our annual SIG (Special Interest Group) Day in Basel last Saturday. I gave a short presentation about our project, including the exciting news about the Federer Foundation support. I introduced my "Teacher Twinning" Scheme as well, and have already got a handful of interested teachers to partner with Matopo teachers. I think this could be the start of something big!
If anybody would like to participate in this please get in touch with me. It would mean so much to the teachers in Zimbabwe, and would certainly also be an enriching experience for you.
I'll probably have time for one more update before we leave for Africa on September 27. Lots to do until then--looking forward to it, to say the least!
We held our annual SIG (Special Interest Group) Day in Basel last Saturday. I gave a short presentation about our project, including the exciting news about the Federer Foundation support. I introduced my "Teacher Twinning" Scheme as well, and have already got a handful of interested teachers to partner with Matopo teachers. I think this could be the start of something big!
If anybody would like to participate in this please get in touch with me. It would mean so much to the teachers in Zimbabwe, and would certainly also be an enriching experience for you.
I'll probably have time for one more update before we leave for Africa on September 27. Lots to do until then--looking forward to it, to say the least!
Thursday, August 6, 2009
A blow
Just when we finally get a breakthrough, the bill comes in, literally.
My husband Peter and I spent long days collecting donated materials, books and other things in preparation for our next visit in October, when I'll be giving the third annual Teachers Workshop Day, a much-anticipated event. Packing, weighing, sorting and lugging the boxes to the Post Office. Paying over CHF 1,300.00 to send 200 kilos of goods. But, I kept telling myself it's all worth it to see the looks on the faces of the teachers and kids when the lovingly prepared items are distributed.
To my amazement the parcels arrived in good time--only 7 weeks.
Now for the blow: Zimbabwe Customs has decided in their wisdom to charge a tariff based not only on the value of the donated items (which is actually less than US$100)but also on the cost of the air freight! 40%!!! HUH?????? We don't get it either, but it's going to cost us US$500 just to get the goods into the country.
I'm convinced this is a rip-off and nothing short of highway robbery--in the end, they are only stealing from their own people, as the money I'll have to shell out would otherwise have gone for things for the schools and the children.
It's one thing when bandits rob you at gun point and take your car. But when the government officials do so too? Rule of law? It's badly missing in Zimbabwe.
The really unfortunate thing is that I will certainly not be sending any more materials to the school--not like that! And who misses out?
Innocent children, hard-working teachers, and parents who are sacrificing everything so their children can get an education.
Some people should be really ashamed of themselves.
My husband Peter and I spent long days collecting donated materials, books and other things in preparation for our next visit in October, when I'll be giving the third annual Teachers Workshop Day, a much-anticipated event. Packing, weighing, sorting and lugging the boxes to the Post Office. Paying over CHF 1,300.00 to send 200 kilos of goods. But, I kept telling myself it's all worth it to see the looks on the faces of the teachers and kids when the lovingly prepared items are distributed.
To my amazement the parcels arrived in good time--only 7 weeks.
Now for the blow: Zimbabwe Customs has decided in their wisdom to charge a tariff based not only on the value of the donated items (which is actually less than US$100)but also on the cost of the air freight! 40%!!! HUH?????? We don't get it either, but it's going to cost us US$500 just to get the goods into the country.
I'm convinced this is a rip-off and nothing short of highway robbery--in the end, they are only stealing from their own people, as the money I'll have to shell out would otherwise have gone for things for the schools and the children.
It's one thing when bandits rob you at gun point and take your car. But when the government officials do so too? Rule of law? It's badly missing in Zimbabwe.
The really unfortunate thing is that I will certainly not be sending any more materials to the school--not like that! And who misses out?
Innocent children, hard-working teachers, and parents who are sacrificing everything so their children can get an education.
Some people should be really ashamed of themselves.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Amazing news!
We just got the most amazing news!
The Roger Federer Foundation is going to sponsor our project at Matopo Primary School!!!
This will give us the opportunity to do so many things we just couldn't afford before--for the next three years at least, we can build on our small beginning in a truly meaningful, sustainable way.
I'm over the moon!
Please help me celebrate this wonderful news by posting a comment!
Cindy
The Roger Federer Foundation is going to sponsor our project at Matopo Primary School!!!
This will give us the opportunity to do so many things we just couldn't afford before--for the next three years at least, we can build on our small beginning in a truly meaningful, sustainable way.
I'm over the moon!
Please help me celebrate this wonderful news by posting a comment!
Cindy
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
little victories
Although the situation in Zimbabwe is far from clear, we have achieved some little victories. The "Spend a Penny" project, which is going to rebuild the Blair toilets at Matopo Primary School, is finally getting started. Thanks to so many kind people who listened and took action, we have managed to accumulate the necessary funds to repair the toilets.
This may seem trivial to those of us who walk into a room with a clean flush toilet, spend our pennies and walk away without a thought, but for the children and teachers it is a big relief to have decent facilities to get them through the school day!
I am presently collecting ideas and materials for the next Teachers Workshop Day which will be held on October 3, 2009. Thanks to the Internet, I have made contact with some really interesting people who do similar work in developing countries, such as Bill Templer, who gave me some excellent tips on activities which don't need much in the way of resources. Bill is a member of IATEFL (International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language) and in the Global Issues SIG (Special Interest Group).
My summer "holiday" will partly be spent on preparing the activities for the next workshop. This will be fun now that I have so many good ideas!
The ETAS (English Teachers Association of Switzerland) link will always show the latest article about the project. I hope you will be interested.
This may seem trivial to those of us who walk into a room with a clean flush toilet, spend our pennies and walk away without a thought, but for the children and teachers it is a big relief to have decent facilities to get them through the school day!
I am presently collecting ideas and materials for the next Teachers Workshop Day which will be held on October 3, 2009. Thanks to the Internet, I have made contact with some really interesting people who do similar work in developing countries, such as Bill Templer, who gave me some excellent tips on activities which don't need much in the way of resources. Bill is a member of IATEFL (International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language) and in the Global Issues SIG (Special Interest Group).
My summer "holiday" will partly be spent on preparing the activities for the next workshop. This will be fun now that I have so many good ideas!
The ETAS (English Teachers Association of Switzerland) link will always show the latest article about the project. I hope you will be interested.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
struggling on
The letters from Matopo Primary School which I recently received paint a gloomy picture. 98%--that’s right—of Zimbabwean schools have shut down in the face of overwhelming disasters including economic collapse, the wide-spread cholera epidemic and starvation. Inflation has been estimated at over a quadrillion percent. A single egg costs $35 billion. News that forex is now being accepted and circulated may or may not be good news. Most people haven’t got any money of any kind.
Mind-boggling numbers, indeed. But the situation at Matopo Primary School is not entirely hopeless. Thanks to ETAS support, morale there has faltered but not disappeared. Patson Mpofu, the Deputy Headmaster, thanked us effusively in his letter for the materials we collected and shipped to the school last year (they particularly admired the T-shirts with phonetic symbols donated by OUP!) and expressed his gratitude for my facilitation of the second Teachers’ Workshop Day which took place on October 6th. Incredibly, Matopo is still fully staffed with teachers eager to begin the new term, despite the fact that there was no electricity or water.
From Patson: “Thanks for taking your precious time to be with us—helping us, encouraging us and uplifting our spirits…we remain hopeful. We will not give up!” As I read these lines I must confess they are blurred by the tears which well up in my eyes. Patson also had these words to say about my husband, Peter, who took the marvellous photos some of you saw at the AGM in Chur and acted as my assistant and general dogsbody at the Matopo event: “Thanks to Peter your precious, handsome, kind, fatherly husband. He is …a living legend…”. This praise has swelled Peter’s head to unbearable proportions but its sincerity is not in doubt!
How can I get discouraged in the face of such courage? So I’m determined to go forward with the project and not let Patson, the other teachers and the children down.
In concrete terms, here is what I’m hoping to achieve this year:
Spend a penny?
The entire school infrastructure has been badly in need of a total overhaul for years, but the most critical area at the moment is the repair and re-building of the “Blair” toilets. For those who may not be acquainted with this style of loo, a “Blair” toilet is an outdoor cubicle which shelters, not to put too fine a point on it, a hole in the ground. Surprisingly, if properly maintained Blair toilets are quite effective at doing the job and not at all disgusting—I can personally attest to that. (In any case, flush toilets of the type we take for granted would be impossible in the arid climate of the Matopos.) The Blair toilets at Matopo Primary School were badly damaged in torrential storms a couple of years ago—it’s either deluge or drought in this part of the country—and I’ve been anxious to tackle this project for some time. The problem is that even amidst all of the administrative chaos so prevalent now in Zimbabwe it’s always possible that some civil servant could get wind of this state of affairs (sorry!) and come along and close down the school due to a lack of adequate facilities for the number of pupils. So re-building the Blair toilets is at the top of my list of priorities this year.
Team up with and sponsor a Matopo Primary School teacher
Another brainwave I’ve had concerns teacher training and support. I hope to continue with the annual Teachers’ Workshop Days, but while these events have done a tremendous amount of good they’re still only once a year. The fact that the teachers are left for the rest of the year without direct support has always bothered me, and I was discussing this recently with Brigitte Zulauf, an ETAS member and friend of mine, when we came up with a brilliant idea: long-distance teacher training by “twinning” a Swiss teacher with a teacher from Matopo Primary School.
Many people have approached me at ETAS events and asked how they could get more directly involved in the project. Here’s your chance to do that! The idea is that a teacher here in Switzerland would volunteer to partner with a Matopo teacher with whom he or she would set up regular correspondence in order to exchange teaching ideas, stories, poems, and so on. The teachers at Matopo would be very grateful to receive worksheets and other materials to help them with their teaching, and the Swiss teacher would surely gain some insights from reading about the experience of teaching in Zimbabwe.
If you’d like to take it a step further, ETAS member Jane Coughlin has proposed the idea of sponsoring a teacher. A teacher at Matopo Primary School should get $US 50.—per month, a paltry enough sum which they have not received now in many months. The government is broke (except when it comes to lavishing extravagant goodies upon themselves, naturally). Until that situation changes, if you would like to sponsor a teacher’s salary for $US600.—per year it would be an enormous help. Of course, you can both be a teacher’s “twin” and sponsor him or her as well! I plan to do some recruiting for this endeavour at the SIG Day in Basel, but in the meantime if you’re interested in participating in this project please get in touch with me. (business@e-tas.ch)
I’m a bit concerned that our current economic crisis may distract us from remembering that there are places where life has been a struggle for survival for countless years. But I do hope that our commitment to Matopo Primary School will not weaken despite our own difficulties, which are, truth be told, very small compared to those in Zimbabwe. I’d like to thank all of you for your continued support for this very worthy project, in particular ETAS member Fay Rogers and her husband Raymond, who encouraged me to submit a proposal to the company where Raymond works, Cargill International S.A.. The company donated $1.000.--!
Just what the toilets at Matopo Primary School need!
Mind-boggling numbers, indeed. But the situation at Matopo Primary School is not entirely hopeless. Thanks to ETAS support, morale there has faltered but not disappeared. Patson Mpofu, the Deputy Headmaster, thanked us effusively in his letter for the materials we collected and shipped to the school last year (they particularly admired the T-shirts with phonetic symbols donated by OUP!) and expressed his gratitude for my facilitation of the second Teachers’ Workshop Day which took place on October 6th. Incredibly, Matopo is still fully staffed with teachers eager to begin the new term, despite the fact that there was no electricity or water.
From Patson: “Thanks for taking your precious time to be with us—helping us, encouraging us and uplifting our spirits…we remain hopeful. We will not give up!” As I read these lines I must confess they are blurred by the tears which well up in my eyes. Patson also had these words to say about my husband, Peter, who took the marvellous photos some of you saw at the AGM in Chur and acted as my assistant and general dogsbody at the Matopo event: “Thanks to Peter your precious, handsome, kind, fatherly husband. He is …a living legend…”. This praise has swelled Peter’s head to unbearable proportions but its sincerity is not in doubt!
How can I get discouraged in the face of such courage? So I’m determined to go forward with the project and not let Patson, the other teachers and the children down.
In concrete terms, here is what I’m hoping to achieve this year:
Spend a penny?
The entire school infrastructure has been badly in need of a total overhaul for years, but the most critical area at the moment is the repair and re-building of the “Blair” toilets. For those who may not be acquainted with this style of loo, a “Blair” toilet is an outdoor cubicle which shelters, not to put too fine a point on it, a hole in the ground. Surprisingly, if properly maintained Blair toilets are quite effective at doing the job and not at all disgusting—I can personally attest to that. (In any case, flush toilets of the type we take for granted would be impossible in the arid climate of the Matopos.) The Blair toilets at Matopo Primary School were badly damaged in torrential storms a couple of years ago—it’s either deluge or drought in this part of the country—and I’ve been anxious to tackle this project for some time. The problem is that even amidst all of the administrative chaos so prevalent now in Zimbabwe it’s always possible that some civil servant could get wind of this state of affairs (sorry!) and come along and close down the school due to a lack of adequate facilities for the number of pupils. So re-building the Blair toilets is at the top of my list of priorities this year.
Team up with and sponsor a Matopo Primary School teacher
Another brainwave I’ve had concerns teacher training and support. I hope to continue with the annual Teachers’ Workshop Days, but while these events have done a tremendous amount of good they’re still only once a year. The fact that the teachers are left for the rest of the year without direct support has always bothered me, and I was discussing this recently with Brigitte Zulauf, an ETAS member and friend of mine, when we came up with a brilliant idea: long-distance teacher training by “twinning” a Swiss teacher with a teacher from Matopo Primary School.
Many people have approached me at ETAS events and asked how they could get more directly involved in the project. Here’s your chance to do that! The idea is that a teacher here in Switzerland would volunteer to partner with a Matopo teacher with whom he or she would set up regular correspondence in order to exchange teaching ideas, stories, poems, and so on. The teachers at Matopo would be very grateful to receive worksheets and other materials to help them with their teaching, and the Swiss teacher would surely gain some insights from reading about the experience of teaching in Zimbabwe.
If you’d like to take it a step further, ETAS member Jane Coughlin has proposed the idea of sponsoring a teacher. A teacher at Matopo Primary School should get $US 50.—per month, a paltry enough sum which they have not received now in many months. The government is broke (except when it comes to lavishing extravagant goodies upon themselves, naturally). Until that situation changes, if you would like to sponsor a teacher’s salary for $US600.—per year it would be an enormous help. Of course, you can both be a teacher’s “twin” and sponsor him or her as well! I plan to do some recruiting for this endeavour at the SIG Day in Basel, but in the meantime if you’re interested in participating in this project please get in touch with me. (business@e-tas.ch)
I’m a bit concerned that our current economic crisis may distract us from remembering that there are places where life has been a struggle for survival for countless years. But I do hope that our commitment to Matopo Primary School will not weaken despite our own difficulties, which are, truth be told, very small compared to those in Zimbabwe. I’d like to thank all of you for your continued support for this very worthy project, in particular ETAS member Fay Rogers and her husband Raymond, who encouraged me to submit a proposal to the company where Raymond works, Cargill International S.A.. The company donated $1.000.--!
Just what the toilets at Matopo Primary School need!
Thursday, April 2, 2009
hope?
The school is finally open--and a really exciting new project is taking place. It's a Pony Club, sponsored by our friend Sandy Paul, whose rescued horses are what brought me to Matopo in the first place.
What Sandy is doing is called Equine Assisted Education, and it's a lot more than just bouncing around a ring on a pony. Sandy's goals include teaching the children about how to care for animals, how to understand how they think, and at the same time developing the children's skills in team work and taking responsibility.
It's a marvellous undertaking and I'm so happy that the children at Matopo have this chance to participate. They deserve this and so much more!
Things are still very unsettled in Zimbabwe and as the world drags its heels in response, speaking for myself I'm very proud to be able to help these small initiatives in a small way.
What Sandy is doing is called Equine Assisted Education, and it's a lot more than just bouncing around a ring on a pony. Sandy's goals include teaching the children about how to care for animals, how to understand how they think, and at the same time developing the children's skills in team work and taking responsibility.
It's a marvellous undertaking and I'm so happy that the children at Matopo have this chance to participate. They deserve this and so much more!
Things are still very unsettled in Zimbabwe and as the world drags its heels in response, speaking for myself I'm very proud to be able to help these small initiatives in a small way.
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