COLLEGIAN EMILY STIRZAKER IN MOZAMBIQUE - Radford College

News Spot Sept ‘10: Collegian Emily Stirzaker in Mozambique 2Emily visited Zimpeto twice before going there this year, once with the Radford group andonce with her family, and she had also spent time in South Africa with her family whileshe was growing up. She expressed her view of Zimpeto in her application thus:Zimpeto Centre has a holistic approach to their ministry. They effectively provideaid to a whole community. Not only do they look after children, but they also lookafter adults, children from outside the centre and provide Mozambicans withmeaningful employment. Their focus is on empowering people to lead in theircommunity. It is a place with a proud respect for the culture and traditions of thepeople they work with.Emily has been at the Centre since February 2010. She describes her activities as follows:My main responsibility is in the girls’ dorm. There are currently 57 girls aged between 4and 20 who live here at the centre. There are three of us who together run the dorm. Inaddition to this I work in ‘hospitality’, which is the team that works with people who visitthe centre for 2-3 weeks. I also do some administration work for the centre and teachEnglish.At the moment, a typical day would look something like this: Start working at about 8:30.Some days I spend about an hour and a half doing administration for hospitality beforeheading over to the girls’ dorm. Other days instead of doing admin I spend time with a girlwho is very developmentally delayed and has a lot of behavioural issues.At the dorm I spend some time going through the girl’s clothes, cleaning the dorm, sortingout craft supplies, books etc and planning activities for the afternoon.When the girls get home from school at around 12:30 I spend some time with them justchatting and hearing all about their days. Then in the afternoon we do learning activities/art and craft/ cooking/ take the girls to the library/ teach English or give out clothing/sortout shoes/ sheets for beds etc.In the evenings I sometimes help out with showering the littlest girls or cut fingernails anddo the rounds making sure everyone has soap and shampoo. Then there is snack time toorganise for the littlest girls and the HIV+/malnourished children.In reality all this is interrupted a million times- by sick girls needing to be taken to theclinic, phone calls from nurses about kids, girls knocking on the door needing things,relatives of children turning up unannounced... the list goes on. In the end I spend a bigchunk of my time putting on bandaids, cleaning infected scalps and listening to long andinvolved stories about arguments that the girls have had.I also am lucky to have lots of time to just play with the girls. I work most closely with the4-10 age group. I spend a lot of time with them, just listening to stories from school,playing games with them, singing, sorting out arguments and giving hugs. I absolutelylove it!