We have had a great start to the year welcoming the new 8 Lower Sixth, and Upper Sixth back. Like last 2 years, Mark had to undergo the grueling process of selecting these students and making a decision. After settling for the final 8 students, we had the privilege of visiting the students in their homes and meeting their families. This is always a great opportunity to get to know the new students better and to have a good insight into their families. It is always a very humbling experience and we always come away feeling incredibly proud of all that many of these families have to face and overcome. Hugely inspirational! Mrs. Albertyn, Mrs Banga and Mr Konolozi did the home visits this year.
The new students have settled well into the boarding house and their respective schools. Considering the massive cultural, social and academic changes they faced they were nervous and took a few weeks to find their feet but with the help of the Upper Sixth they have made the transition well. Mrs Banga has also enjoyed getting to know all 16 students.
We were thrilled with the A-level results our pioneer 15 students achieved. They obtained 24 A*, 12 A, 7 B, 4 C and 1 D. We feel these results reflect the incredible hard work they put into their work over the two years. Ryan has been offered a full scholarship to Tufts University in USA and we are so pleased at this amazing opportunity. Mercia is working for an investment company who are paying for her degree while she works. All the other students are applying for scholarships and we will find out shortly what the outcomes of these are. The current Upper Sixth also achieved such good results for their AS-level examinations. They are all working so hard towards their end of year exams this year.
To celebrate the exam results for our past and present students we organized a walking safari at Mukuvisi. The students went on a bush walk for just over two hours and the students thoroughly enjoyed it. It was their first experience of walking amongst wild life and they asked the guide lots of questions. A reward for their long walk was a refreshing ice-cream!
Lisa came fourth in the Black History Month Essay competition and she had the chance of meeting the USA ambassador to Zimbabwe to receive her prize. Well done Lisa!
We would like to congratulate Taringana (St Georges student) and Lisa (Hellenic student) on being accepted onto the US Achievers Programme. We are so proud of them and we know that this programme will provide them with an incredible opportunity to possibly access a scholarship to study in the USA.
The Upper Sixth students are preparing to write their SAT exams in June and Rebekah Bell has so generously volunteered her time to prepare the students for this examination. She is holding holiday lessons for them from the 3rd to the 9th of April 2013.
It was wonderful for our students to have the opportunity to enter the Science Olympiad. They wrote the exam on 7th of March and we are eagerly anticipating the results and hope that possibly for a few of them, they will get the amazing opportunity to visit South Africa.
We ran a personality profile workshop for all 16 students where they identified their personality types, how to work through their strengths and weaknesses and also how to interact with different personalities. The students were asked if they could guess what Mr Albertyn and Mrs Albertyn’s personalities were – 2 of them got it right!! They found this workshop to helpful and we are thankful to Taryn Dube for giving up her time to run this.
Once a month on a Sunday evening, Sian has continued to run games evenings. These as always are loved by the students. We also have a volunteer drive any students that would like to go to church 3 Sundays out of 4.
Charlotte has run extra English lessons for all our students every Friday. English is something that all our students struggle with because of the schools they have previously attended and even though they are highly academic often their results are affect by their English. Charlotte has been brilliant in making these Friday sessions fun, informative and keeping the students up to date with current affairs. We so appreciate all our volunteers time!!
Pamela and Phillip (students at Gateway High) took part in the Eisteddfod. The performed in various different singing entries. They won honors in 5 performances and had a special honors performance evening where they were able to showcase their songs. They both so enjoyed participating in this. We were proud of them and their school.
We would like to give a special mention to Multichoice Zimbabwe. They currently sponsor 3 of our students, as well as providing monthly groceries to the Boarding House. We have been blown away by their generous donations of groceries and have seen such a noticeable difference to our expenses because of this. Thank you!
Our administrator, Hope Mudangwe, will be leaving us after a year and 4months of service. She will be going back to study and further her career and we wish her every success. Hope has served Makomborero Zimbabwe tirelessly during this time, setting systems in place, often going the extra mile, building relationships with sponsors, trouble shooting etc. We have found her to be a valuable member of our team and we will miss her greatly!! We hope she will check in with us from time to time! Thank you Hope!
We would like to welcome our new administrator, Joan and our new driver Mike Konolozi, we know that they will become valuable members of our team too!
We would like to thank all our valued sponsors for their continued support. The work of Makomborero Zimbabwe would not be possible without your support of us and belief in what we wanting to achieve!