Visiting Bulawayo

The Jacarandas stopped blossoming and it is getting hot: it’s summer and so the rainy season has started! I thought I would never say this as a Belgian, but I am happy it has started raining again. After six months of no rains and with the current high temperatures, people in Zimbabwe have been longing for rain.

Last week I was in Bulawayo again, in the city where I had spent my first week in Zimbabwe. Bulawayo was hot, extremely hot. It hasn’t rained there for a long time. Luckily it started raining after a few days, so people were happy. Maybe you know the city by now as it gained international fame a few months ago because of the ‘Big Flush’. This was even on the Belgian news. The citizens were asked to flush the toilet all together at the same time in order to clean the pipelines.

Bulawayo is one of the places in Zimbabwe that stole my heart. Why? Where should I start … Coming from Harare you enter into Matabeleland. When you get out of the bus, you can already feel the relaxed and laid back atmosphere in town. Living in a big city like Harare, this is exactly what you need! The broad streets, nice temperature and people living there give you that feeling. People living here speak IsiNdebele, a language that is totally different from ChiShona. You don’t have to know Shona in order to hear the difference with the language of Matabeleland. In Ndebele, people make a clicking sound with their tongue in order to pronounce certain letters. There are at least five different letters you can make with your tongue! You can try it out yourself and take a few Ndebele lessons through the following video:

 

Seven months ago I was in Bulawayo for a National Programme Makers’ workshop. This time I went back to Hillside Teachers’ College for a Monitoring and Evaluation workshop. All teachers’ colleges we work with hold such a ‘monitoring and evaluation workshop’ in order to evaluate and reflect on the activities they have done over the past year. Next to this, they make a planning for the following year by putting programme-related college activities on the college calendar. Such activities are related to gender, HIV and AIDS, teaching practice, environmental education etc.

Besides Hillside Teachers’ College, KGVI was also on my menu. At KGVI, I interviewed some pupils and teachers for a movie project of VVOB Brussels. Besides this, I could also admire the work of Mieke and her colleagues. KGVI is one of the schools that is part of VVOB's schoollinks programme, through which Belgian and Zimbabwean schools work together. This wonderful programme is really worth exploring further on the schoollinks' website.