Back to School

At long last, Tuesday the 27th of January is back to school for Zimbabwean children, whose parents can afford to pay their fees in US dollars. This is the time of the year when the burden of being a parent is heaviest (especially in a hyper-inflationary economy) as parents run around preparing for their children to go back to school fully equipped with all the required educational resources. (Asika nzou hairemerwe nenyanga dzayo)



My first born daughter Amanda who is fifteen years old and will be writing her Cambridge 'O' level this year is such an intelligent kid who loves learning and has always excelled in all subjects ever since she was at kindergaten. She values education so much that every spare time she gets she allocates it to studying. My aim is to help her reach her full potential in education. My other daughter Emma is eight years old and is very good at Maths but needs a lot of help in writing English (she must have got that trait from her father because the mother has a blog that shouts out loud her ability in writing English), although she is very good at oral English. She has been very unfortunate in the sense that, it was during the time when teachers became so demotivated with the little salaries they were getting that they stopped teaching properly, that she started going to school. This blow had fallen at the most critical period in her life, the period of transition when the newly-awakened mind is at its freshest, most receptive stage and educational concepts that are the foundation of a successful education had to be laid down into her brain. I speak, it must be understood of a mind that had not been previously trained or pressed into a mould or groove by schoolmasters and schools and badly needed that mould so that it could belong to the group of literates. This is the stage when kids are most curious and most eager to learn which needed to be utilised by motivated teachers so that knowledge is most readily assimilated and above everything when the foundations of character and the entire life of the child is mapped out through the knowledge that he/she manages to absorb from the teachers. Parents at home do their part to educate their children but they can't do as much as trained teachers can do in schools. My little daughter together with many other Zimbabwean children is a victim of a government that believes in paying plumbers who fiddle with their toilet more money than teachers who fiddle with our children's brains. Zimbabwean children are like wretched captives, tied hand and foot and left to lie there until it suits Mugabe, Tsvangirai (the leaders of Zimbabwe) and all the policy makers (Gono and all those who determine the salaries of teachers) to set them free and give them their right to proper effective education. OUR CHILDREN ARE WORTH IT.








This year I found myself with a "back to school", bill of US$800 covering the school fees needed for my two daughters and all the groceries, stationary and food provisions they required. Where to get that kind of money when my employer pays me in worthless Zimbabwean dollars which are equivalent to only US$20 became a question that gnawed my mind and made me toss and turn in bed endlessly. (Kurara hope rugare)Years back when my ex-husband and I divorced, I had vowed to myself that I was going to be self-dependent and will not ask him for anything, even the upkeep of the children if he doesn't offer to do it willingly, and ever since that time I have enjoyed sticking to that vow because the economy could still make me afford to be self-sufficient. This year with the US&800 that was needed for my children to go back to school I had no option but to swallow my pride and ask their father to pay their school fees and buy all the required educational resources. I learnt the hard way that pride is a word that exists only in a healthy economy. He failed to raise the whole amount, only managed to come up with US$400 so I had to come up with an idea to raise the other US$400. I decided to gather a lot of goods in my house that I could afford to do without and then have a yard sale today. It turned out to be a sucessful exercise and I mananged to raise the US$400 I needed for my daughters to attend school this first school term of 2009. Thanks be to God for making the Yard sale successful as well as to all the people who did not ignore the yard sale signs and actually stopped by and bought all those different peices of my past. Some of the goods were of great sentimental value to me and I hope and pray that they will add value to the lives of the people that bought them so that they cherish them as much as I did. Only sold them because my children's education is more important than any goods of sentimental value.