An Update from Mark and Laura Albertyn – 1st Term 2018

We love the start of each new year – it is filled with such hope and expectation.  It is also an incredibly hard adjustment for our new Lower Sixth Students coming into the house.  It takes all term and they are brave and courageous as they face a completely different culture in the Boarding House and at their new schools.  BUT they are all doing so well and as we reflect over the term we can see how well they are adjusting!  Welcome Patrice, Muzi, Martha, Tinaye, Simba and Tino!

Also welcome to our new Lower Sixth External students – we were so pleased to be able to give you each a solar light and back pack kindly donated to us for you. Not only our external students but our internal students too received backpacks. These were so generously donated to us by IH Group and a wonderful past student that Mark taught at Hellenic. Often people are unsure how they can help but these kinds of donations make such a huge impact on our students’ lives!

We were also thrilled to receive our examination results for 2017 this term.   AS Results: 21As, 10Bs and 5C’s, A level Results: 2A*s, 9As, 7Bs, 8Cs and 1D and Zimsec (External Students) 13As, 2Bs, 2Ds and 3Es.

Tino started with us in January and sadly got an infected handed which went to sepsis very quickly.  It was a very painful experience for him and an incredibly difficult time for us trying to access health care for him.  It highlighted the desperate state of our health care system in Zimbabwe and we were very thankful we had the funds to mix private and government cover for him.  He has made a full recovery and is settling into school life well!  He has also been selected to attend a 3 week exchange programme with a Jesuit school in Boston.  What an incredible opportunity this will be for him.

Roy, Munya and Brandon received full academic colours at their respective schools for their outstanding AS results – well done you guys!!  Chiko also received half colours for Cross Country this term – a sport he never knew how good he was at!   Shyline has also been on a journey of discovery with her sprinting, shotput and hammer throwing – she’s really good!  Isabel, Lincoln and Patrice have done exceptionally well in Chess and Isabel has made it to the nationals over the Easter holiday.  Roy and Donald took part in the choirs that performed in the Eisteddford, winning Honours in a few categories.  We love seeing our students discover new talents!

We had a fantastic movie night with all our students – we went to go and see Black Panther.  What a wonderfully empowering and inspiring movie.  It was also an incredibly fun evening, especially as for most of our student it was their first time at the movies!

Our Life Skills sessions have been lively this term with fantastic opportunities to chat, share and build deeper relationships with our internal students.  These have been such a highlight of the term!  The students learn lots and so do we!  We were able to implement our Safe Guarding policy at the beginning of the term, as we do each year and in light of the Oxfam scandal to know that we have a policy in place already is very reassuring.

Mobile Science Laboratory

Our Mobile Science Laboratory has kicked off this year with two sessions running every Saturday, with students from all over Harare.  It is exciting to see our teachers and volunteers run with this programme with such passion, week in and week out.  We are seeing students gain confidence and love what they are learning each week.  We look forward to Term 2 and the new students that will join us.

Girl Child Mentorship Programme

In collaboration with ALA Mastercard and our past Makomborero Zimbabwe young ladies we will be launching our Girl Mentorship Programme in May.  This is an incredible opportunity for us to impact vulnerable girls who could very easily drop out of school due to many factors.  These young girls will be roughly 14 years of age and we have been working on a curriculum and planning an exciting project that will run for the rest of this year.  More details will follow as we launch a little by little campaign on Global Giving to fund this life changing project.  What makes this project sustainable is that it will be Makomborero past students who run the weekly meetings.  Young ladies who know first-hand the struggles these young girls face.

Global Giving

We were thrilled to host Global Giving for an afternoon in March where they came to inspect our operations and how we run Makomborero Zimbabwe.  It is wonderful to partner with an organisation that checks on the integrity of an organisation, making sure that donors funding is being spent well and on what the money was donated for.  They were such an encouragement to us and kept saying they were blown away at what we do.  We feel their visit is a huge endorsement for us.


Volunteers

We love our volunteers to come in and help in specific areas of need.  Saskia for her incredibly inspiring English lessons on a Friday, Alison for her fantastic knowledge of writing essays for university applications, Tsungi for his help with our Life Skills sessions this term and Patricia Mutumha from Nicoz Diamon for inspiring our 2017 leavers on their career choices.  Without volunteers it would be very hard to do what we do!

Thank you

A big thank you to all our corporate and individual sponsors who really do make it possible to do what we do!  Your support is so valued!  Thank you, Thank you for continuing to choose to partner with us.

We were also so grateful to have Simba, one of our UK Trustees out to visit as term closed.  We are incredibly thankful to our UK board for their dedication and commitment to Makomborero and all that we do.

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Belinda’s story – from Makomborero to a Botstiber Scholarship!