Greg & Sophie
I’ve touched on this briefly in other blogs but Zimbabweans do have quite a lot to complain about. Electricity and water shortages are just two of them to mention but there are many things we notice that make things difficult here for people.
The weather however is never worth complaining about. Never in my life and probably never again in England will I sunbath twice over a winter weekend and wonder whether or not my factor 20 will be sufficient for my already white man slightly tanned complexion. (Or lobster look which is probably a fairer reflection upon my ‘tan’.) It’s supposedly the height of winter at the moment and this is the coldest time of year here in Harare yet you could glance on our weather at any time on any website and see average temperatures around 22 degrees and not a cloud in site. Admittedly the weather is a little chillier at night and when it drops to 4 degrees and you have no fire or central heating you are searching for the hoodies and blankets but I still wouldn’t call this something to complain about.
The reason I write this is to illustrate for you the differences in attire at this time of year. This morning I realised I needed to wear trousers and a jumper to work but this afternoon we’ve been doing PE and I then donned shorts and a t-shirt. Contrast this with a child in my class getting changed for sports who needed to remove leggings and track suit trousers after removing his school trousers. 3 layers of trousers is only beaten by his vest, t-shirt, polo neck jumper, school shirt and school jumper of 5 layers. I’m unsure if I have ever worn that many clothes even in the height of an English winter.
It’s at times like this when I analyse these things in far too much detail that I’m reminded that as teachers we often learn more than we ask the children to. I learn from Zimbabweans and particularly from these children a lot and it is because of this that I am very grateful for this experience!
Thank-you to everyone who has supported us to be here so I can continue to learn more and more!
Hey All,
On Wednesday Sophie and I secured 30 day extensions on our visa’s. This means we can stay here and work until 17th of July at no extra cost. It is great news but still means we are waiting on our new visa for a further years stay! They are experiencing a lot of applications to come to Zim at the moment so it may still take a while to clear our papers!
We’re hoping and praying that it’ll be sorted before the 17th of July and that we won’t need to pay an entry visa when we return from holiday at home in September! Finally we are also praying that the new visa will be for a full 12 months until this time next year!
We’ll be sending out our June Newsletter over the next few days so if you are not registered then please register!
Thank-you for all your support and encouragement. We really appreciate every message we receive!
Greg (&Sophie) x
We thank God that our first sports day was a huge success! For pictures and news check out http://onewaypreschool.co.zw/sports-day
Thanks for all your support and prayers, it was a beautiful day and we had many compliments. Most importantly the children are full of it today!
Hello All,
This Friday is our first ever sports day here in Zimbabwe. We’ve busily came up with a format and timetable and our sports day will finish with a Braai. The children will be racing in their age groups over races such as the obstacle, sack, wheelbarrow, relay, potato and spoon and backwards running as well as the straight running race. We’ve decided against this non competitive nonsense that we see at schools these days. These kids will race to have fun and all children will receive a certificate for taking part. Although those children who win their races will receive an extra first place certificate to further celebrate their achievement. It’s my first experience of seeing such little kids competing but seeing the smile on their faces and the laughs of other kids who are spectating it really is a whole lot of fun and I’m really excited for Friday. I will post pictures at the weekend if I can work out how the gallery works. (If I cannot then Sophie will because she is better at these things than me!)
Our Braai afterwards gives us the opportunity to once again interact with the school family and increase our links with the local community. The food is all being done by a local butcher and parent who now supplies the food for our school too. It is important to Sophie and I to link with our community for this schools future legacy.
Here’s a picture of our certificates the children could win designed and printed by our great friend Mr. Witness who continues to support the school so faithfully!
Additionally in our weather report we are currently having periods of overcast weather where we are told ‘it is very cold’ and see the children in coats, gloves and scarves! It is pretty horrid right now but I wouldn’t call 18 degrees and overcast very cold just a little chillier than normal. For example I have trousers and a jumper today for probably only the tenth time all year. As people will know I’m an embrace the flip flop type of a guy! Normal ‘winter’ weather back tomorrow; glorious sunshine and 23 degrees!
PS: We are still yet to receive our VISA’s which now expire in 11 days time so please continue to pray for those.
We had the pleasure at the weekend of inviting work people and their families around to our place for an English style BBQ. I have noticed that an African Braai is more for those on the Atkins style diet. They actually Braai huge steaks and mountains of other beef to eat with Sadza and an array of fatty sausages. Something I actually really love. Despite this our spread of Beef burgers, pork sausages, chicken, our soon to be famous potato salad, pasta salad, Sophie’s salsas and what i’ll call an English salad all went down really well. It was a lot of fun and a pleasure to have them all round to our house. We have such a large space so it does seem a shame to not share it. Apparently in shona culture you do not ask people to come over to your house. You just expect them to turn up. I’m glad people don’t do that to me, not because I don’t want their company just because Sophie and I are pretty careful with what we buy so we’d have to travel to the shops to pick up some more food if people did just show up. We ate food and the kids got to play together in our huge garden while the adults got to relax properly after eating too much.
We are hoping to make these social events a regular occurrence as we continue to try to grow the One Way Pre-School and then the Hope For Harare family.
Below are a few snaps of our BBQ day where you can see the food, the children playing and Zvido on the swings. I also use this a public apology to my wife who always ends up behind the camera rather than in the pictures! Apparently this fact makes me useless husband. I AM SORRY!!!
Teaching little kids was often one of those things that I would have turned my nose up at. I recall some friends of mine whilst we were training as teachers agreeing that heading for the early years meant too many runny noses and smelly bottoms for our liking. And I whisper it now with shame but also that there wasn’t any ‘real’ teaching in this years.
Well I’ve now been teaching early years for 17 weeks of teaching and I have to say that some of my previous worries were true. The children are snotty, dirty and sometimes smelly but actually none of that bothers me. I’m fairly surprised how much I’ve enjoyed it and I’m shocked at the progress my class have made. I was saying to Sophie the other day I don’t understand how we’ve done it but these kids are chatting away in English, writing, reading and some of mine are even subtracting! One of my previous colleagues; Nikki loved moving from year 3 to a split 1/2 class and said it was incredible the noticeable progress they make when they are younger and I couldn’t agree with her more.
I know we’re here to teach them but they also teach me so much too. They’re capable of learning at an incredibly fast rate and we’re expecting them to use and apply this new knowledge daily, but they rise to it. Sophie says that my high expectations of the kids (being used to 10 year old work) is one of the reasons for this progress and it’s also one of the reasons why when we do return to teach in England once more I will search for an early years posting. To understand where they have come from and their innate learning capacities will increase my progress as a teacher further.
Finally I would say even though you look at one of the kids books and see that they couldn’t hold the pencil in January and they are now writing the, she and he independently I could not say that his progress is greater than that of the progress of Sophie and I have made as teachers and as people. I have mentioned it before that one of the best messages we had before our excursion to Zimbabwe was about learning more than teaching and this gets more real with every day I work in this country!
On an aside note to this blog we are yet to receive our VISA’s which expire on June 22nd and we need these to stay in the country. After all the hard work we’ve done I really don’t want to stop now so if you are praying type the please ask God for a swift decision with these papers!
Thanks and lots of love Greg (and Sophie!) x
As you may be aware, in order for us to remain in Zim each year, we have to have a visa which enables us to work for the ministry and reside here. We apply for a Temporary Employment Permit with residency. This costs us $500 each, for each year, so $1000 each time!
We were under the impression initially, that we would just be able to renew our visa each year, however, it turned out that as ourpermits are temporary, we have to re-apply each year! This is quite a long process and involves a lot of paperwork. We mustered everything together, and found that our visa expires in 7 weeks, and the process can take 6 weeks…so cutting it fine!
After around 10 trips back and forth between the visa place, we finally had everything they requested. We were then told, that the process would mean our visas run out on the 22nd June, they wanted us to go on the 21st June and see if they had approved us, if they had, great, if they hadn’t, they were going to charge us a further $110 to get a 3 month tourist visa while we wait for re-approval of the TEP! Stressful.
We sent one of our Pastors with a final document to the visa building 2 days ago, he returned with an envelope.
Incredibly, we have already been approved, and in a couple of weeks we need to return to the visa building and get them stamped in our passports! So we are officially here until June 2014 with these new visas. Such a huge weight off our minds as the thought of having to leave the country was weighing heavily and we did not want to do that!
So thank you to all those who have prayed for swift effective approval, prayers have most definitely been answered!
x
To celebrate, here is a picture of Spike, the Warthog. 
One amazing part of our life in Zimbabwe has been getting to know, working with and spending time with Lorraine and her lovely family. I recently asked her a few questions about her life. I was so inspired by her I just had to get her permission to share it with the rest of you.
Lorraine grew up in Zvimba which is a Zimbabwean rural area about an hour and half drive from the capital city, Harare. She grew up in a small house without running water or electricity. She lived with her Grandmother and her early life was filled with many tragedies. Her parents passed on when she was in grade 7 (aged 13) and her two younger sisters have also passed on more recently. Her Grandmother brought them up but it was often a struggle. Zimbabwean rural schools are fee paying and often she would be sent home from school due to not paying fees. Lorraine’s values on education are so huge so this would upset her but I’d have been more annoyed about the 10km walk back home. I told Lorraine that must be about 2 hours to walk but she laughed and replied that she’d run and it would take an hour. When Lorraine could attend school she’d attend a building with no more resources than a pencil and book and she says the odd text book to study from. She described school to me as ‘samey’ but a privilege. On the days she did go to school she was aware she had to work to pay for the next terms fees rather than play out with friends.
However education is not all Lorraine and her Grandmother would worry about, the children wouldn’t eat before school and they’d eat just once a day before bed. Lorraine chuckled through a story to me about days when they would take the maize from the side of the road to roast and then share the bits between each other for something to eat. After all this hard work I was expecting Lorraine to then tell me about passing grade 7 and continuing to secondary school. But despite her hard work Lorraine could not pass grade 7. Not because of lack of fees this time but because of a divorce between her parents. When Lorraine was only 2 they got a divorce and that meant she had no birth certificate, therefore an inability to prove her age. Unfortunately the school story doesn’t finish with something extrinsic either. Despite going to school as often as she could until the end Lorraine could not find the funds to take the examinations and therefore was unable to finish school. This would be equivalent to dropping out a week before taking your GCSE’s in England.
These days Lorraine lives in Mabelreign, Harare with her husband and 4 daughters aged between 12 and 1. Before working with us she did a number of jobs locally such as a seamstress, cook, administrator and nursery teacher before coming to work for us. She still supports her Grandmother who lives in the rural area who has 5 to look after including Lorraine’s cousin’s sister who is HIV positive and 2 babies, one of which who is also HIV positive. At 86 years old the grandmother still works in the fields to feed and school these young children with help from Lorraine.
Lorraine’s 4 children (Martha, Makanaka, Zvidozvashe and baby) are absolutely beautiful, they are polite, kind and have been incredibly supportive of Sophie and me. I asked her about what ambitions she has for the future and she passionately tells me how she wants to commit to a project to work or run an orphanage. She says she wants to “realise the potential of those forgotten children”. She wants to see orphans have the same love, care and education that God would want for them. On the other hand she says that it is hard to imagine that such dreams could occur in her life when they live in a two room house where the only place her children can play is on the bed they all share.
Despite all of this Lorraine thanks God for what she has. She is such a challenge to me. She’s had a life I cannot easily comprehend. Yet she praises God, I feel so humbled. How often in my life and the societies we grew up do we blame God for the troubles we have? Yet in Lorraine’s life she says the upbringing she had from her Grandma taught her that God is the centre of everything good. Brought up a Christian Lorraine is a passionate member of our church and despite the tragedies she has seen in her life. It’s not easy for me to understand that she is less than 5 years older than me. Lorraine believes that the reason she’s still alive is because God has some amazing things planned for her and her family. I think that she’s so hard working that she’s capable of doing anything she puts her mind to.
A few years back I watched an Oxfam advert with a phrase “people in Africa don’t want hand outs, they just want a chance to do it themselves” and with that in mind and thanks to some incredibly generous funding we are sending Lorraine back to school. She’ll be going to college for the next 6 months of weekends as well as working for us Monday-Friday. At the end she’ll have a certificate in education which she hopes to extend to a diploma afterwards. For Sophie and I, the education of adults is hugely important in the future of our project and to be honest despite everything we have done in opening the school supporting this wonderful, inspiring woman in this way is my highlight of what this project has achieved.