+ United Methodist Church makes difference in rural Zimbabwe
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Skills Training
Five minutes away from the new church is another United Methodist construction site, this one for a skills-training center.
"Getting jobs in Zimbabwe today is a thing of the past," Chimbwanda says. The skills-training center will equip people to earn money on their own, through such trades as carpentry, woodwork, knitting, sewing, candle making and even engineering.
"The issue we are suffering a lot is brain drain," he says. The political climates in African countries have resulted in many educated young people leaving the continent.
The skills-training center will provide a next step for young people orphaned by AIDS as they leave the Fairfield Children's Home at Old Mutare Mission, another United Methodist ministry. The home cares for children ages 2 to 18.
When the orphans leave the Children's Home they will be able to live on the campus of the new training center. Sixty percent of the students at the center will be from the home; 40 percent will be other local people who do not go on to a university or college.
"This is our dream," Chimbwanda says. "We are doing this as an exit point for them to get into the world. ... Education is power."
"You want the individual young people to be able to stand on their own feet," says Bishop Nhiwatiwa.
When completed, the center will have an administration unit, a chapel for the students, and hostels or dorms. Local people are molding the bricks and donating door frames and window frames, says Chimbwanda. The administrator's house will be completed by 2007, followed the next year by dorms. He expects the training center to start in 2010.
