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Marko looked at me and laughed. “If anyone had told me in advance that my promotion would mean dealing with all these challenges, I might never have taken the job. The worst part was that, on top of all of the terrible things that were happening inside Zimbabwe, our grant-funding got cut because the global economic crisis caused our faithful donors – including the Stephen Lewis Foundation -- to suddenly experience their own loss of income.”
Marko said, “In late 2008, we applied to the Stephen Lewis Foundation for a significant increase in funding – which is what we felt we needed to keep serving the 305 children who came here daily, plus their siblings, grandparents and other family members in the community. You can’t imagine our shock when we got an apologetic phone call from Canada and were told that the Foundation could only afford $20,000, due to the global recession. As soon as possible, they said, the Foundation would try to increase our funding once again. But when would that be and how would we cope in the interim?
“Suddenly, it felt like the earth fell out from underneath us. The Foundation had paid for several salaries, my own included. Even worse, we had relied on the Foundation for the educational support we provide to children – specifically, the payment of school fees, supplies and uniforms, which are required in Zimbabwe -- and for the purchase of maize-meal and beans that we use to feed the children each day, Monday through Saturday.”
When the news came in, Marko gathered the staff, volunteers and Board of Trustees. He told them that they had to prioritize activities under the new grant, and determine the best way forward. This was a group process, as everyone involved had a stake in the outcome. They chose to focus on education; using what money they had to keep as many children as possible in school. (School uniforms got scrapped, though – children were told to keep wearing their same clothes as the year before.) At the time, they hoped that Catholic Relief Services would meet their food needs, as that organization functioned as a conduit for the World Food Programme.
Unfortunately, about a month later the World Food Programme announced that they would concentrate exclusively on rural areas. Once again, Chiedza’s children lost out. Chiedza now had to rely on individual donors to buy food, supplementing the vegetables they grew in the garden. Marko said that he felt haunted every night by the image of 300-plus orphans who came every day to the Centre to eat the only decent meal they ever got, and to enjoy the emotional support and recreational games they desperately needed. “This isn’t just something we knew in the abstract,” Marko said. “We had been to every one of these children’s homes: we knew their caregivers, and we knew we were their only lifeline…” Marko said that there were days that he and the other staff just walked around dazed, unable to see straight.
Marko also spoke of a loss in medical care. The biggest hospital nearest to Chiedza closed down with the government’s health-care collapse. Caregivers and clients on treatment simply couldn’t access drugs anymore. Two of Chiedza’s children died because they could no longer get the HIV medications, as did 6 caregivers and one of their staff. Marko said, “We provided transportation over and over to go to the hospitals for medicines and tests, but the medicines were simply not there. Food was not available, either.” Twice, Chiedza had drive to Botswana to buy large supplies of food, which was expensive and hard to obtain.
Like some other non-governmental organizations in Zimbabwe, last year Chiedza also lost their reserve-funding – in their case about US$19,000-- when the government took control of all the accounts held by these organizations in the bank. “They simply wiped us out.” Marko said, “They claimed that the government needed this money as part of their emergency recovery plan.” This money was never returned. Then Chiedza tried to get government fuel-coupons and other types of in-kind support as an exchange –“just anything,” Marko said -- but all their appeals have gone unanswered. This money represented Chiedza’s back-up funds that were supposed to cover the organization in the event of an emergency. Now the emergency happened, but the back-up had disappeared too.
Marko took up the story again. “I am just relieved we have soldiered on,” he said. “The organization survived as did most of our children, although sadly we lost some of the quality-of-care that had been our hallmark.”
By mid-2008, many of Zimbabwe’s schools ceased functioning because the government paid the teachers so little money that it cost them more to get to school and back, than they got paid at the end of the day. Seeing once again that their children were suffering, in September 2008 Chiedza’s staff decided that, since education was no longer taking place in the schools, they would establish a supplemental school-tutoring program. They hired four part-time teachers, four afternoons a week for two hours a day, and they concentrated on serving children who faced the government-exams at the end of the year -- in Grades 4, 7 and 10. Marko said they went beyond their own children to include some others but suddenly this meant that they also had more mouths to feed. “These children rarely ate more than once a day,” he reminded me. “You can’t expect them to learn on an empty stomach.” The staff spent a lot of their time running around for food wherever they could get it – maize at one place, cooking oil at another, leftovers from some embassy function at a third. This meant other things didn’t get done and the program staff spent less time working directly with the children, but they felt they had no choice.
Marko had hoped that the need for tutoring would be temporary but with the near-total collapse of Zimbabwe’s educational system in 2009, they decided to continue the program. Marko had included the tutoring activities in their proposed budget to the Stephen Lewis Foundation. When that fell through, Marko tried a potential opportunity with Children First (a US government program). But that required an entirely redesigned school-support program. “It was touch-and-go for a long while,” Marko said, “because Chiedza didn’t quite fit into the USAID (US government) mold.”
Marko continued. “We insisted on maintaining a holistic service, despite the rules that keep USAID from paying for food except under very restricted circumstances – which we didn’t meet. But still, we needed to feed these children. We also wanted to build the children’s resilience and give them hope, which meant infusing our activities with emotional support and the opportunity for psycho-social expression. But where would that money come from?”
Via their USAID funding, Chiedza started providing block-grants for two terms (8 months) to local schools, to which they would give learning materials and supplemental teacher-training in exchange for a pledge by the school to absorb 150 poor children each, without requiring their payment of school fees. At first, just three schools were involved -- but with additional savings, Chiedza added another school, meaning that 600 children could be helped. Soon discovered that many of the Chiedza’s own children were not among those pupils covered by the grants because they attended different schools. To fill the gaps, they used funding from their Stephen Lewis Foundation grant, and also from Quantas Airlines (their other long-term donor). Before the end of this year, Chiedza will add four new schools under USAID, and hopefully this next set of schools can include more of their existing children.
In the meantime all the schools have added other costs that families now have to pay (not covered by the block-grants). Children who don’t contribute these extra expenses are sent home, made to sit in the back of the classroom, or prohibited from taking exams. “It’s not that the schools are mean-spirited,” one of the principals explained. “The problem is that the government no longer pays for any supplies or repairs, and many teachers have made it clear that they will only continue teaching if their salaries are supplemented by the school.” Around the country, children are increasingly being forced to bring US$1 per week to help pay their teachers, plus extra fees for chalk, office expenses and their schools’ upkeep. But in many low-income households, one dollar represents more than a day’s earnings.
Of course, the children who suffer the most are, once again, the poorest of the poor – in Chiedza’s case, those children who came to the center every day. “When this happened, I didn’t want to come to work in the mornings,” Marko said. “It was so terrible. The children would cling to us, crying that they wanted to go to school and study, but we couldn’t promise them anything. All we could do was assure them that we would try.” Then Marko reflected. “I think by now we have got just about everybody covered again, although one girl came to me yesterday and it seems that her situation has not yet been resolved. But we are working on it.”
Unfortunately, with the tutoring program last year the support came “too little too late.”. None of the eighty children who took the exams passed. The government allowed the younger children to continue into the next grade anyway, but the Grade 10 pupils had to repeat the year. When Chiedza decided to continue their tutorial program this year, they re-designed it to focus specifically on preparing for the exams. When word got around, one afternoon, Marko found 150 students pushing into a room that only holds 20 children. After a while, another tension arose: A teachers’ strike began at many schools, and several principals responded by sending the children to Chiedza for lessons. It got so bad that some community-children were heard to say that they wished they were also orphans, so that they could get Chiedza’s help.
Eventually the USAID program paid for more tutors (through September this year) and “classrooms” were established under trees. Chiedza hopes that they have done enough this year so that at least some students will pass their exams in November. They also hope that the government will take over their responsibility and that the schools will start functioning properly again, beginning with the new school year in January 2010.
It won’t be easy. The quality-of-care remains Chiedza’s major concern. It’s not just attending school that counts, but what the children learn. Marko calls Quality his “driving force.” He would rather ensure long-term impact on a fewer number of children, than focus just on the number of children served. They lost a chance of funding from UNICEF because they couldn’t scale-up fast enough. Marko said, “We are about trying to change children’s lives. We have already trained every staff person in basic counselling skills and we want to train them more in psycho-social supports. We want our children to feel comfortable and loved and to know that this is a place where they can go for help. You can’t do this piecemeal – to provide a quality service you have to respond to the whole child.”
Whew! What can you say after hearing all this?
P.S. I inadvertently forgot to take a photo of Marko, but the young man with whom I'm standing is called Washington -- now going by the name "Tino" -- to whom I introduced you previously in one of my earlier diaries about Howard Hospital's work in Zimbabwe. At that time we "discovered" this boy -- then 15 years old -- who was single-handedly taking care of himself and two younger siblings. Here is his now, obviously doing much better due to the support provided to him and his family by the hospital staff and volunteers.
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