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Be Zam-bitious!

  |   community programs, education, report from the field, travel, zambia   |   No comment

Driving around Ndola today, the radio kept playing the same ad, one for ZamTel (a cell phone service provider around here). I wasn’t so captivated by their offer of discounted talk-time (cell phone minutes for the phones here), but the catch phrase they closed each ad with caught my ear… “Be Zam-bitious!”

Ambitious (or Zam-bitious) is a great way to describe our partner organization here. When Charles Mumba and his wife began taking orphans into their home 8 years ago, they had big aspirations for their future. They couldn’t stop at just helping a few children. The community school that they started was founded to provide the orphans from Hope House, and many more kids from their community, a quality education so they could build good futures for themselves. The poultry farm Hope has launched, together with Spark Ventures, has ambitious goals for growth, all in order to provide a sustainable source of income for the community programs offered here.

These big, long-term, Zam-bitious goals for the children Hope Ministries serves have informed the past years of organizational development. But, it is also day-to-day ambition that drives the staff to keep this organization improving. With the fairly recent donation of three desktop computers, the Hope staff jumped at the opportunity to lean new skills that will allow them to create dynamic teaching materials and to make their work more efficient. So, I spent this afternoon working with Teacher Lewis and Teacher Angela, reviewing the basics of creating documents.

We added charts and tables, created ven-diagrams, inserted photos and arrows for labeling images. Teacher Lewis was thrilled about how the diagrams could improve math lessons, and Teacher Angela was excited about how the kids would be able to label images with newly learned vocabulary.

We’re starting from the very basics with the teachers’ computer literacy levels. But, the best part of today was the squeal of excitement from Teacher Angela when she figured out how to insert a picture and found a treasure trove of clip art images that could complement her lessons.

We ended the day with high-fives all around (and a re-enforced lesson on how to save your hard work in an organized folder). Tomorrow, we tackle excel… with the Zam-bition found in every member of the Hope team I foresee great strides being made over the next few months as they get more and more comfortable with these programs.

-Stephanie

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