ZIMKIDS ORPHAN FOUNDATION
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Mission Statement
We provide a new type of family for AIDS orphans in an impoverished peri-urban community outside, Bulawayo Zimbabwe, a family that not only ensures that the children have food, medical care, education and vocational training, but one in which they are valued as individuals and helped to reach their potentials. They receive food, assistance with school fees, tutoring, psychosocial support and medical care. As they grow up, they learn computers, construction, welding, tiling and wiring, skills they can use to build futures. We also provide a host of specialized services to our children who are HIV+ and special mentoring for girls. Along with concrete skills, we teach our Zimkids to organize, anticipate and lead by providing them with supervised experience. Our Council of Elders - our 15-18 year olds - run our Tech Center, book club, chess matches, sports teams, drama and dance activities. They tutor and cook for the younger children - , using ingredients from the chicken projects, greenhouse and drip-irrigation garden they also oversee. When they finish high school, we send them to outside training for certification in auto mechanics, early childhood education, counseling, First Aid and nursing. But they always come back because they are members of our family and, as such, expected to “pay it forward” because Zimkids was built by orphans and is run by orphans for orphans.
About This Cause
Since 2006, Zimkids has provided a safety net for more than 5000 orphans with food, recreation, medical care, educational and vocational opportunities and a supportive family. We started out in a neighborhood yard in Pumula North. Then, in 2012, the city of Bulawayo gave us a piece of land for our center to grow on - and our older orphans built a complex of six buildings, learning on the job how to pour level foundations, lay brick and block, build roofs, install plumbing and wiring, weld burglar bars and table bases and and erect solar panels to keep us off the grid. The programs we created are not pulled out of some wider NGO handbook but developed, bit-by-bit, in response to the intrinsic needs of the orphans in the community. The children we work with are extremely fragile. Not only have they watched their parents die, but most have been traded around among relatives, moved from rural areas to town and often back, used as servants by distant relatives, or trapped at the age of 12 raising two or three younger brothers and sisters. We’ve managed to create the type of supportive family they need because the “heads” of our family are their brothers and sisters, alumni of our program who understand their challenges from the inside, and who have also learned, from us, new personal, interpersonal and practical skills. Our older children who are HIV positive run a health and wellness program for their younger peers. Our counselor is an alumna of our program whom we sent for professional training. We maintain our own minor clinic run by older girls who have received appropriate training and coordinate with the private physician who volunteers her services to us. And our younger girls listen to the mentoring they receive because it is delivered by young women they consider their older sisters. All our staff members began with Zimkids when they were 10 or below and are now guide the project and make dreams come true for the younger beneficiaries, just as theirs have been realized. So when we say, “Built by Orphans, Run by Orphans, For Orphans,” we’re serious. Our 16-year-olds tutor our 12-year-olds. They plan and run our sports programs, teach chess, read to our preschoolers, keep an eye out for who might be looking upset and fill our facility with joy. Young people who didn’t know how to turn on computers three years ago are now instructing 3-year-olds. And our trainees maintain our solar array, wire our buildings, build our furniture, maintain our garden and, in the process, learn how to become self-supporting. Ultimately, that is the point because we need to prepare our children for challenging times in a chaotic country where they have no family support systems. So while we ensure that they thrive today, Zimkids never loses its focus on tomorrow.