Lessons Learned in Zimbabwe

I have written before about my son’s experience with children in Zimbabwe, and thought that you might be interested in hearing about his time there in his own words. It is hugely gratifying to know that he is willing to give of himself to others, especially to children.

When I was growing up, adults in my life often asked me what my mother did for a living, and I always felt awkward and unsure answering this question. The response that I resorted to was memorized at an early age, probably from observing my brother answer the same question. 

“She is the president of a national childcare company,” I would say as boldly as I could, and then hope that the asker was satisfied. He or she rarely was.

 “A childcare company, what exactly does that mean?”

“I’m not sure really, but I think it has something to do with day-care, and babies, and something like that, but she travels a lot all around the country.”

It’s funny, looking back, that the idea of a childcare company, or even just childcare in general, never made much sense to me when I was younger. “What’s so important about childcare?” I used to think. “How is it that something as big as a company can manage something as small as (dare I say it) babysitting?” I had no idea, and never did I once think that my first professional endeavor after graduating high school would be with a childcare organization. 

But it was. If my mom hasn’t told you already (because it seems like she has told the entire world!), I spent the past six months living in Zimbabwe and volunteering for the Child Resource Institute Zimbabwe, a branch of the International Child Resource Institute based in Berkeley, California.

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My work was concentrated in two programs. The first, a transit home registered through the Zimbabwean Department of Social Welfare that provides temporary (although often permanent) care to abused or abandoned children mostly within the age range of one to thirteen. The second project is a private secondary school attached to a network of three orphanages for child victims of abuse.

I could write pages describing what these programs meant to me, about the tremendous spirit and beauty in each of the kids I worked with, about the challenges faced by the care-takers and administrators on a daily basis, about the state of orphans in a country ravaged by poor management and disease. But because this is my mom’s blog about childcare and early childhood education, I’ll focus on that aspect of the experience and how I came to understand it in an African context.

Needless to say, I knew next to nothing about ECE before embarking on this experience. The week before I left, I spent a morning with the executive director of ICRI, Ken Jaffe, who took me on a tour of preschools in Berkeley. Being an expert in the field (and he truly is!) he pointed out to me all of the subtle manifestations of the latest ECE research around what I perceived to be a standard classroom.

He showed me the daily schedule that emphasizes a child-directed environment. He walked me through the various activity zones and how they are each carefully constructed to maximize creativity, independence, and safety. He described to me the importance of bright colors, shapes, and artwork, as well as photographs of the children and their families so that they feel a sense of ownership and belonging.

He took me out to the playground where he emphasized the importance of having opportunities for interaction with nature, and for singing and dancing. This was much more than babysitting, indeed! After a second tour of some of my mom’s preschools in the bay area, I came to understand ECE as a highly specialized and intricate field that incorporates a range of diverse subjects into its operation.

Aside from this basic comprehension of ECE, I also embarked on my travels with some fundamental, though probably premature, beliefs about the African continent.

I was a firm believer that the significant problems that plague Africa today are a direct and traceable result of European imperialism and the industrial revolution. Perhaps this is a bold statement, and there is no doubt that my experience in Zim served to both question and reaffirm this belief, but I still stand by it after having returned. Not unique to these “problems” is education, and more specifically early childhood education.

What I found is that Zimbabwe’s education system, from preschool to university, is modeled after the old British standards that emphasize test-taking, rote memorization, physical discipline, and lecture-based learning. In this system, there is no room for independent thought and creative problem solving. There are no long-term projects or group collaboration. Students (or toddlers) don’t speak unless spoken to.

They aren’t taught to speak in front of others, or to have confidence in any idea that wasn’t taken directly from a textbook. For early childhood education, the concept that a child can learn through playing and interaction is unheard of, an oxymoron. 

And the outcomes of this system, in combination with other factors that had inhibited healthy development of the children I was working with, were troubling to witness. At the secondary school, the students couldn’t look me in the eye in conversation.

When asked what they might be interested in writing about for a school magazine, the room fell dead silent. Only after several months of working with them did the students begin to open up and embrace a new learning style.

At the younger orphanage, it was even more apparent that this old British system of education had compounded the damages resulting from abuse, abandonment, disease, and malnutrition. I saw the children looking with fear at their caretakers when I asked them what games they enjoyed playing.

When I handed out paper, they asked me what they should draw. When I initially attempted circle time, they sat in silence, often looking unsure, bored, or even sick (indeed, many of them were). 

Perhaps I’m unqualified to say so, but I believe most of my audience would agree that this old British style is not the best way to educate children, especially those under age five. It has taken the western world centuries of research to realize this, of course, and though schools in the West have come a long way because of that, Africa is still catching up. 

But the irony of this reality is that all of this “latest research in ECE” was already an inherent part of pre-colonial African cultures. That is to say that if Africa had been left in isolation, if imperialism had never happened, than many of these western “best-practices” in ECE would already be an ingrained and organic part of much of the African continent.

What do I mean by this?

The African cultures that I have experience with (in Zimbabwe and in Kenya) are rich in dance, music, and singing, all of which are ingrained and celebrated from a young age. Indeed, it was difficult for me to visit any program without experiencing a ceremony of singing and dancing as an expression of gratitude from the children. In fact, I hear this practice is even more elaborate in western Africa, to the point of being a burden on scheduling.

In addition, these cultures emphasize story-telling, and passing on history and morals to their young through rich oral traditions. Once the younger orphans began to open up to me at the end of my stay, I witnessed them sharing some of these short parables that seemed a part of their collective consciousness. While watching this, I kept imagining how pleased Ken Jaffe or my mom would be to see such an organic child-directed environment.

Furthermore, there is a natural community and extended-family involvement in raising children in most of Africa, a kind of village mentality that manifests itself in all aspects of life and is sorely lacking (I think) in the west.

For a child growing up in Zimbabwe, any peer is a brother or sister or cousin, any woman is a mother, any man a father, any older woman or older man is a grandmother or grandfather.

The effect on children of such village-like connection is a tremendous sense of belonging, pride, and responsibility, as well as respect and compassion for each-other and for the earth.

That brings me to another manifestation of the “latest research in ECE” in pre-colonial African cultures: exposure to nature. Despite the effects of imperialism and modernization, African children are still much more tied to and interested in the natural world than their western counterparts.

In the rural areas especially (though not exclusively), children are able to plant maize (corn) by the time they can walk. They are taught the importance of keeping their environment clean, healthy, and well-managed because their families and villages depend on it. They understand that they are a part of nature, that there is an interconnectedness of all life. On a more surface level, they are happy to spend an afternoon swinging in the mango trees, or playing games with rocks and twigs in the dirt below. And I could go on, but for the sake of keeping this blog at a reasonable length I’ll end my list there.

 The saddest part of Africa’s story, for me, is the inferiority complex that colonialism has created. It is so backwards that in much of Africa today, West is best, even envied. What I was trying to do in Zim, or at least what I told myself I was trying to do, was to undo the damages of imperialism one tiny step at a time. Of course, this brings up a whole new set of questions regarding my role as a privileged westerner in the developing world, of whether or not more meddling, even to undo the meddling, is what is truly needed.

And while I haven’t figured out the answers to those questions yet, I at least feel some satisfaction that I could be a small but real voice there saying that “West isn’t best.”

In fact, Africa is often even better.

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