Taryn Romanczak: july 29 updated

July 29, 2016

Today we visited another local school.

This school was in a much better position than the one I previously visited, but Chipangali also supports this school as many of the workers at the orphanage send their children to this school.

It is one of 2 out of almost 50 schools that offer computer classes. The computers were desktops and would have been considered outdated by our standards.

The sheet hanging on the board is the screen they project things onto.

The school had a nursery where they would start all the plants for their gardens.

They had a water harvesting technique for when it rains. The water from the run off is contained in ditches that goes from plant to plant, all around the property. Most of the water is collected from the roof.

They also had a school garden where each class gets a bed and they use it for their aquaculture lessons.

They soak chicken manure in water to use as fertilizer for the gardens.

They also had a new design on the hand wash facility so the students don't have to touch the knobs to turn on the water after they go to the bathroom.

Rather than have the students touch the handles, a foot pedal system was devised so no more dirty hands turning the water on and off!

The goal of the school is to produce children who can fend for themselves regardless of the level of education they finish. Some families can not afford to send their children all the way through school. All of the students also help raise chickens that are sold for meat and eggs.

Even though this looks very similar to a commercial layer system in the US (much much smaller scale), this is relatively new in Africa and not very common. The school uses it because they are limited on the space that they have.

Behind the school they have a garden for the students who do not eat prior to coming to school and for lunch. This is a problem due to the parents only having enough money to pay school fees. The school fees per child per term are $40- there are three terms per year. So $120 per year. Some families don't even make that much money a year.

Any upgrades to the buildings come from fundraising efforts. There are about 750 students in the school and they do not have enough classrooms for all of them so they have some new ones under construction that they are currently using for teaching as well. All children enrolled in government and private schools in Zimbabwe have to wear uniforms. This is so that there is no way to know the income level of a family. I did notice there were many students who had numerous patches and/or holes in and on their uniforms. All of the students seemed to help with keeping the outside areas of the school clean including sweeping and raking. They loved the lessons that Natalie's students made for me to share with them.