I was offered a lift back to Lusaka on Tursday. Cruising down the Great North Road in the aged Toyota Venture, reggae music blaring out for the entire four hour journey, I reflected on my last interview in Kitwe. It was with a young man called Blessings Zulu, a Cecily’s Fund graduate now grown up and settled with a good job.
People often ask me what the long term prospects are for the children we support through school. It’s a good question, since unemployment is high in Zambia (estimated at 50% in 2000). The economy is dependent on mining, particular copper mining, but even the mines can’t absorb all of Zambia’s tens of thousands of orphans, even the few thousand that we help to complete their schooling.
So what else is there for them to do? When you ask children here what they want to do, their responses are the stuff of dreams rather than reality; some as old as 18 and still in grade 8 or 9 say they want to be a judge or a pilot, or a television newsreader. Others aspire to emulate the professionals who have helped their families through terrible suffering; teachers, nurses, doctors. I tried changing my question from “What do you want to do?” to “What do you plan to do?” Even then none mentioned the most likely prospects for them, selling vegetables or bags of charcoal in the market, becoming a bus driver, a garden boy, or even a miner.
Then, on my very last day in Kitwe, I met Blessings Zulu. Blessings is part of the Youth Anti-AIDS Network, or YAN – a spin-off of the Copperbelt Health Education Programme through whom Cecily’s Fund delivers its peer health education training. Blessings’ story reflected that of so many of the children I’ve met on this trip; both his parents died when he was very young, he was brought up by his aunt, a widow caring for five orphans as well as two children of her own, plus her aging mother. She struggled to hold down a job and sell clothes in the market to pay for all their school fees. Then Cecily’s Fund started paying Blessings’ fees and providing the clothes and equipment he needed for school. He passed all his exams, and then went on to our teacher training programme. But this wasn’t his true vocation. Seeing what Cecily’s Fund, and our partners were doing for him and others like him, he was iinspired to do similar work.
While at college, he and a few others set up YAN to train young people to be peer health educators. They got funding from various organisations and with the small salary he drew from that, he left teacher training college and paid his way through a social work course at the University of Zambia. Blessings was apologetic for “letting us down” by dropping out of his teacher training course. But I reassured him that he had nothing to apologise for; he had used his education, his initiative and his determination to fulfil his aspirations. In the process he is benefitting countless others by helping them understand how to avoid HIV. Isn’t that exactly what Cecily’s Fund exists for? As Blessings put it, “Without you people I would have been a bus driver or someone very low. But because of my inner strength and my respect for the help that you gave me, I am where I am today.”
Tomorrow the flame trees will again be replaced by English Autumn leaves and I will begin the delicious job of incorporating all the touching and inspiring stories that I’ve heard from some amazing people, young and old, into our communications to you. I’ll also be putting the snippets of video film of Zambian children singing onto the website, to kick start our Make Music Give Hope fundraising campaign which will be launched on December 6th. I hope you’ll join us.
Back to Cecily's Fund website