Teaching The Leaders Of The Future
I volunteered alongside 8 other members of the Harare WordPress community to go on an outreach meetup to teach WordPress to a young group of pupils at the Centre For Total Transformation CTT
The Centre For Total Transformation is a Zimbabwean Private Voluntary Organisation that seeks to reduce poverty through transformational socio-economic strategies consistent with faith based biblical values. The organization runs a centre which offers non-formal education, youth development, sport & recreation, and a supplementary feeding programme alongside various other community-based social responsibilities such as drinking water and shelter for disadvantaged members of the surrounding community.
To find out more about the Centre and how you can help click the button below
The internet through mediums such as blogs allow us to share our stories and experiences from our perspectives with the world and there’s limitless potential in the power of reclaiming our own narratives…
“Until the lions learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter”
Those who follow my blog, know I am passionate about blogging and that I love to be known as an “Uncle of Bloggers” always to trying to find ways of expanding and enriching the blogging communities of Africa.
This volunteer experience stood out the most for me because at the very beginning it partly felt like an uphill exercise in futility, imagine trying to explain WordPress to a group of about 10-12 year olds, who have never really used a computer and those who have, know it mostly as a device for playing games and watching movies, then add words like software, hardware, website, developers, internet, bloggers…
After an ice-breaker session where we asked the kids to introduce themselves and share a little about themselves such as favourite activities and what they wanted to be when they grew up, we had one of them volunteer to tell a story (ngano)
Ngano are our traditional folk tales, normally they are about once upon a fictitious time; when animals talked and usually carrying some sort of moral life lesson.
Gamuchirai’s rendition of a ngano (folktale) was a creatively imaginative story involving literal head-hunters, who dressed up as angels to scam a simple religious community into believeing that they were heavenly messengers sent to tell them it was time. So they meekly had their heads cut off…
I wish I had written down the story so I could remember it better, maybe next time I see Gamu I will ask him to do me the honour of sharing it on my blog, (if we haven’t managed to find a way to have him have his own)
Later the kids were asked to write down a short essay about themselves as a quick exercise and then tasked with typing up the essay as a word document. We encouraged them to write in a language they were comfortable with and not to worry too much about grammar or spelling mistakes.
Zita rangu ndinonzi Gamuchirai ndiri mukomana ane makore 12. Kana ndakura ndinodakuita mutungamiri wenyika. Chikafu chandinoda chinoti rice and chicken ndinoyera Shumba inonzi Nyamuzihwa. Ndinofarira kutamba bhora.
Ndinogara kuSnakePark uye chikoro changu chinonzi CTT kumusha kwangu kunonzi Mozambique
Ndiri mutambi webhora ndinozikanwa zvikuru mudunhu redu ndinotamba panamba9. Team yandinofarira inonzi PSG
ndatenda
By Gamuchirai Rhodesia
School: Centre for Total Transformation CTT
Translation:
My name is Gamuchirai I am a boy aged 12. When I grow up I want to be President. My favourite food is rice and chicken. My totem is the Nyamuzihwa lion,
I live at Snake Park and my school is called CTT. I come from Mozambique
I play football and am well known in my area for playing the number 9 position. The team I like best is PSG
TRUE STYLE by Gamuchirai Rhodesia
One day the weather was cotton covered with sesame seed and the birds where singing sweet shiny songs, it was my first day of the Chimurenga
Stories written by the other kids will be available on a common blog that was created for them after a brief walk-through on the steps of opening a WordPress.com blog
One of the question Gamuchirai asked me after a brief tour of my blog was so how much do you get from having a site such as this….
I laughed and I laughed and I laughed and I laughed.
Then I told him one doesn’t do it for the money…
All in all it was a fun day all round for the team of volunteers and the kids who opted to come to school on Saturday instead of be elsewhere, and I hope we might have started a spark that will lead to something bigger…
~B
PS I told them I would write a blog post about the day and now if you could kindly comment with where you are reading this post from so I can share with them the reach the internet has, thanks😆…..
Becoming The Muse 
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