Once upon a time

 

Once upon a time,
in a country far far away from Belgium
somewhere in a small town called Chinhoyi,
before the ST²EEP period
and even before the ZimPATH period,
when Ambrose and Mqapsi were still peer educators,
 the idea of a toolkit was born ….

 

In that small town of Chinhoyi, the peer educators wanted to support and inform their peers and other people in the college community on HIV and AIDS and other life skills, they were passionate about it. Together with VVOB, they started to collect and make material on these topics; a lot of creative and innovative ideas popped up!

After a while, all the fourteen teacher education colleges started to use that material and added their own ideas to it. The material was very useful and it became a big success! Some years later, there was so much material available whereby the idea rose to compile this material all together. At the beginning the plan was still vague, but eventually it became clear that the material would be compiled in a participatory toolkit, and bit by bit, the toolkit started to take shape…

About ten months ago, when I started to work for VVOB Zimbabwe, team members were busy working on this toolkit. They were editing texts, writing an introductory guide, contacting artists etc. I was asked to join this “task team” and felt really honoured. A toolkit about years of work of VVOB and its partners was being made!

Nine months later, the toolkit was finished. These nine months consisted of editing, more editing, working on the layout, printing booklets and CDs, ordering boxes, the packaging of toolkit, etc. Here are some pictures of that part of the process:

 

The beautiful end product of this process is Nzira Yeupenyu – Indlela Yempilo: A Guide to participatory life skills development:

 

A national workshop for college Health and Life Skills Coordinators has been held and soon the toolkit will be in the colleges equipping the preservice students with the requisite skills to adopt health promoting behaviours and to teach Health and Life Skills in Zimbabwean primary and secondary schools. And one day that much sought after dream of zero new HIV infections will be realised.

Visiting Bulawayo

The Jacarandas stopped blossoming and it is getting hot: it’s summer and so the rainy season has started! I thought I would never say this as a Belgian, but I am happy it has started raining again. After six months of no rains and with the current high temperatures, people in Zimbabwe have been longing for rain.

Last week I was in Bulawayo again, in the city where I had spent my first week in Zimbabwe. Bulawayo was hot, extremely hot. It hasn’t rained there for a long time. Luckily it started raining after a few days, so people were happy. Maybe you know the city by now as it gained international fame a few months ago because of the ‘Big Flush’. This was even on the Belgian news. The citizens were asked to flush the toilet all together at the same time in order to clean the pipelines.

Bulawayo is one of the places in Zimbabwe that stole my heart. Why? Where should I start … Coming from Harare you enter into Matabeleland. When you get out of the bus, you can already feel the relaxed and laid back atmosphere in town. Living in a big city like Harare, this is exactly what you need! The broad streets, nice temperature and people living there give you that feeling. People living here speak IsiNdebele, a language that is totally different from ChiShona. You don’t have to know Shona in order to hear the difference with the language of Matabeleland. In Ndebele, people make a clicking sound with their tongue in order to pronounce certain letters. There are at least five different letters you can make with your tongue! You can try it out yourself and take a few Ndebele lessons through the following video:

 

Seven months ago I was in Bulawayo for a National Programme Makers’ workshop. This time I went back to Hillside Teachers’ College for a Monitoring and Evaluation workshop. All teachers’ colleges we work with hold such a ‘monitoring and evaluation workshop’ in order to evaluate and reflect on the activities they have done over the past year. Next to this, they make a planning for the following year by putting programme-related college activities on the college calendar. Such activities are related to gender, HIV and AIDS, teaching practice, environmental education etc.

Besides Hillside Teachers’ College, KGVI was also on my menu. At KGVI, I interviewed some pupils and teachers for a movie project of VVOB Brussels. Besides this, I could also admire the work of Mieke and her colleagues. KGVI is one of the schools that is part of VVOB's schoollinks programme, through which Belgian and Zimbabwean schools work together. This wonderful programme is really worth exploring further on the schoollinks' website.

 

Some highlights of being a volunteer in Zim

It’s been a few months since I have been writing on my blog. To be honest: time is flying in here! I started my job as a volunteer at the end of April and it just feels like I landed yesterday. After four and a half months being in Zimbabwe, lots of things have happened so I’ll share some of the highlights of my stay at VVOB with you.
 

Let me first start by telling how we operate in VVOB Zimbabwe. Generally we work within task teams which can be joined by any team member. A task team can be about any theme so the type of work varies from subject to subject. In a task team you can work around ECD (early childhood development) or M&E (monitoring and evaluation), but also around the new students who come on attachment or team time. Team time is a weekly activity that is organised with the team. It can be about teambuilding, a team member sharing a certain experience, learning by doing an activity, … in other words: there is time for the team.

Recently I joined the task team on TP (teaching practice) and mentorship. In this task team, we prepared for a national workshop on TP and mentoring with all 14 Teachers’ Colleges involved in the VVOB programme. The preparation is a whole exciting process: looking at the needs of colleges, preparing the workshop, developing a scenario, preparing the facilitators, etc. And finally the moment is there! A two-day workshop that provides a platform for colleges to share and reflect on their experiences. Although the workshop came to an end, it doesn’t mean the end of a task team. It’s actually the start of a new process!



Nyadire art classroom

Nyadire Teachers' College will do their own ‘college-based TP mentorship workshop’ this week. About 200 participants (student teachers, teachers and heads of schools) are expected on their workshop to improve the quality of teaching by student teachers on teaching practice. A group of college lecturers started preparations a few months ago. VVOB supports such workshops by funding and giving technical support, e.g. in the preparation of the workshop.

 



Nyadire vegetable garden

Colleges are usually closed because of  holidays during the bigger part of August. This year they were suddenly closed earlier than expected because lecturers had to be trained to conduct a national census. This also affected the VVOB activities. The purpose of the ten-day census was to collect information about the country’s population.

 

During the short holiday in August –it was Heroes weekend- I discovered one of the beauties of Zimbabwe: the Victoria Falls. It is the largest waterfall of the world and is shared by Zimbabwe and Zambia. This natural world wonder is definitely worth visiting when you are in the neighbourhood!
 

A few weeks later I picked up Mieke from the airport. Mieke is a Belgian student coming from Arteveldehogeschool. As soon as schools open again and the third term starts, she will work as a speech and language therapist at King George VI (KGVI). KGVI is a school for children with special needs located in Bulawayo, also named the City of Kings and Queens. If you would like to know more Mieke’s experiences, you can follow her by reading her blog http://mie-in-bulawayo.waarbenjij.nu/. Enjoy reading!

Zimbabwe, a first impression

‘Hello, how are you?’, ‘I’m fine and you?’ These are the first words you hear when you arrive in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe is a landlocked country which had a tumultuous period recently: between 2007 and 2009 it was confronted with a hyperinflation and a cholera outbreak. Next to this, Zimbabwe writes history with their president, R. Mugabe, who is governing the country since 1980.

After arriving in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, I travelled southwest to Bulawayo. Here, my first workday for VVOB took off. As VVOB states, it works on ‘ education for development’, which is realized through the Quality Education and Vulnerability Programme. For more information about this Flemish organization and their activities in Zimbabwe, you can check the VVOB website (http://www.vvob.co.zw/).

In Bulawayo, VVOB supported a three-day workshop called ‘Programme Makers One’ at Hillside Teachers’ College. During this workshop, 61 lecturers were trained (by eight other lecturers) to become facilitators. How did they do this? As you can see on the pictures, various participatory methods and a lot of energy were used!  




Introductory session

Teambuilding

role-playing

Bulawayo is not only famous for being the second biggest city in the country and for his mayor college, but is also known for hosting the Zimbabwe International Trade Fair (ZITF), which my colleagues and I visited. I learnt a very important lesson and a first step in “surviving Zimbabwe”: when the president and his convoy are passing on the street, everybody has to stand still, whether or not you’re on foot, by car or by bike!