LOYOLA LINKS

• January 22, 2012
• 12:01 am
• Steve Christensen
• one comment

Children of the soil

Elizabeth Mhangami (BA ‘07) founded Vanavevhu, an organization dedicated to helping children orphaned by the AIDS pandemic in her home country of Zimbabwe.

“The 10 years I lived here were spent figuring out how to get back home,” says Elizabeth Mhangami (BA ’07). Mhangami moved from her hometown of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, to the United States in 1999, a year after her high school graduation. She moved back to Bulawayo in 2009, where she now works as the founder and executive director of Vanavevhu, an organization that assists children orphaned by the AIDS pandemic.

Vanavevhu, which means “children of the soil,” is based in Chicago, although it operates in Bulawayo. The seed of the idea that became Vanavevhu had started to grow in Mhangami’s mind in 2003. That year, through the Rotary club in Chicago, Mhangami organized an effort to send medical supplies to Zimbabwe in light of the country’s mounting political and economic troubles.

“It was important to me to be involved in what was going on at home,” says Mhangami. “I was a citizen in the diaspora with access to resources.”

But Mhangami soon began to question the ways she could and should contribute to her home country. “I started studying political science, post-colonial Africa, and dependency and aid, and I started questioning what my role was,” she says. “I started wanting to be effective in a way that would be more empowering than handouts.”

Mhangami transferred from Harold Washington to Loyola in 2005 and began focusing her studies on the transition of women from informal to formal actors on the international political stage.

“Through reading and gathering all this knowledge, I began to identify my position and my politics,” Mhangami says. “I came to read about children who were heads of household as a result of AIDS. Zimbabwe was becoming the country in sub-Saharan Africa with the highest number of orphans.” According to Mhangami, the phenomenon of child-headed households was first recorded in Rwanda after the 1994 genocide. It became clear to her that AIDS was creating a similar community in Zimbabwe.

After graduating from Loyola in 2007, Mhangami pursued a master’s degree in women’s and gender studies at DePaul. She registered Vanavevhu in Chicago. “I named the organization before I knew what I would be doing,” she says. “I started finding where my purpose could be.”

In 2008, Mhangami traveled to Zimbabwe to do research for her thesis. It was the first time she’d been back in nearly a decade. “I started assessing how practical it would be for me to move back,” she says. “Zimbabwe had just had a pretty violent election, and that helped me make the decision.” She moved in December of 2009.

“I was one of those kids who grew up in Zimbabwe watching MTV ,” Mhangami recalls. “When I was told I was coming to America, I was excited. I thought it would be like Fresh Prince or Saved by the Bell. But when I got there, I learned there’s no place like home.”

Vanavevhu now works with 11 households supporting 60 dependents. The youth who are heads of their household range in age from 14 to 22. Eight are girls and three are boys, and they are largely the firstborn. Some have been taking care of themselves and their siblings for as long as six years.

“We select the households we work with by looking for youth who have been involved in entrepreneurial activities or informal trade on their own,” says Mhangami. “They’ve been able to take care of their families and survive—especially in 2007–8, when the country saw hyperinflation rates—without descending into illegal activities. These youth managed to do what work was available with little education and few skills, and they made enough money to continue.”

John Rex-Waller, CEO of National Surgical Hospitals, is active on the board of Vanavevhu in Chicago. He was born in Zambia and raised in Zimbabwe, and he connected with Mhangami through the Rotary club project that sent supplies in 2003. “I watched the idea develop,” he says, of Vanavevhu. “When she was ready to move, I wanted to help in any way I could to get the business on the ground.”

Rex-Waller, who met with the Vanavevhu youth during a visit in April, was impressed by their resolve. “They’re incredible. One of the kids was taking his incapacitated father to the hospital in a wheelbarrow, because he couldn’t walk,” he says. “Relatives would come in and take what they wanted from the household, but they couldn’t afford to look after the kids. So the kids just said, what now? They put their siblings through school and fed them. They have had a really tough time, but there’s no sense of victimization there. They just figure it out.”

Vanavevhu works to educate the youth and sharpen their existing practical skills. It provides childcare support and resources for food and utilities, valued at about $100 per month.

Originally, Mhangami thought that, with the financial support of Vanavevhu, the youth might be able to return to school, but she found that their experiences as heads of household made it difficult for them to go back to their old routines. “They’re not your conventional teenagers anymore,” says Mhangami.” The idea of putting that child back into the school system—especially in Zimbabwe, which is very top-down and authoritative—doesn’t work. A child who has been making life choices on her own and supporting a family is not going to thrive there.” Many of the youth no longer talk to friends they had in school and suffer additionally under the stigma of being an orphan.

“We took this as an opportunity to be creative and to provide them with a different sort of education,” says Mhangami. She borrowed from her experience at Loyola, where she ran a project called Rogers Park Yes—a youth entrepreneurship program.

“I borrowed that curriculum, contextualizing it to teach business development and entrepreneurial skills,” she says. Vanavevhu started a market garden, through which the youth learn agriculture and sell vegetables to the local community. They began candle-making and beekeeping projects. Mhangami hopes they will eventually be able to start a for-profit beekeeping enterprise producing honey and beeswax candles. Because there are three or four power cuts a week, every household buys candles.

The agricultural industry has also suffered.

“We no longer produce sugar; we import it,” says Mhangami. “Honey would contribute to the rebuilding of the economy. These are local products that can be consumed, and the youth are making something of themselves in a difficult environment.”

The youth come in to Vanavevhu Mondays through Thursdays from 10 to 4. For the first two hours, they work in the garden, making beds, watering plants, or planting crops. In the afternoon, they split into two cohorts—one that has been with the organization for over a year, and a newer group. The older group works on small business courses, making candles, and doing beekeeping. They then sell the candles they’ve made, putting coursework into practice and trying to make a little money.

“What’s fun about Vanavevhu is how theory is being turned into practice, which is really exciting to me, having spent so much time in academia,” says Mhangami. The second, newer cohort is in security and stability training this year. They learn about hygiene, sexual responsibility, children’s rights, and budgeting and banking. They also participate in an intensive outreach program, in which Vanavevhu staff visit their homes every Friday to assess how they’re using groceries and dealing with health issues (some of the youngest siblings are HIV-positive). Vanavevhu also does social and emotional assessment of the youth, with the eventual goal of helping the head of the household reintegrate into the community.

Mhangami is pleased with the progress so far. “There have been challenges along the way, but our project has been really successful,” she says. “We have youth that have been so isolated from mainstream society, and just getting them to trust us as quickly as we have is a success.”

Rachel Slager, a Vanavevhu volunteer who spent three months in Zimbabwe, says she has been inspired by Mhangami. “She said she didn’t want to create a food program or apply a Band-Aid; she wanted to solve the problems,” Slager says. “I was compelled by her vision to create long-term solutions, to start small and ensure a measurable impact.”

Mhangami hopes the organization will continue to expand, adding new households and cohorts annually, as well as staff to support them. She also hopes Vanavevhu can start offering small business training to other underserved youth, aside from those that are heads of household. “The education system in Zimbabwe has deteriorated in the past 10 years,” Mhangami says. “A lot of kids are going to school, but what they’re getting isn’t practical in this environment. Entrepreneurial and practical skills will allow them, I hope, to start their own businesses.”

Mhangami has found the transition back to living in Zimbabwe to be challenging as well as rewarding. “The difficulty comes from living in a country that doesn’t look like the one you grew up in,” she says. “Driving down the streets, you look at a fountain in a park, and you remember the plumes of water that used to go up every 10 minutes. It doesn’t do that anymore.”

John Rex-Waller’s return to Zimbabwe this past April was his first in 30 years. His impressions are similar. “What struck me was the infrastructure, which is in desperate need of repair,” he says. “Roads need repair. Streetlights don’t work. Parking meters are rusting on the pavement; there are power outages. I remember Bulawayo as this pristine, wide-streeted place, but when I went back, it was all different.”

But he also sees reasons to hope.

“The optimism of the people in spite of what they’ve gone through is remarkable,” says Rex-Waller. “And now that the economy is dollarized, it’s expensive, but it’s stable.”

Mhangami is similarly optimistic. “I’m very lucky to be living at home in a moment of transition,” she says. “I can go to bed knowing that I’ve contributed to the rebuilding of a country. It’s satisfying. The political situation continues to rage
on—and depending on where you stand, it can look like things aren’t getting better. We are at the edge of either falling completely into utter chaos, or seeing ourselves come out of this in a positive way, and there are positive stories to tell. People are coming back. There is hope.”

Carlisle Rex-Waller, who is active in Vanavevhu and is married to John, underlines the aspirations of Mhangami and the organization. “What I would say, or reiterate, is what a terrific group of kids Elizabeth has recruited and what a wonderful rapport she has with them,” she says. “Despite the many challenges they have faced and that lie ahead, there is such a positive dynamic that one cannot help but feel very hopeful.”

Elizabeth Mhangami is now working on capacity-building, finding avenues of support, and recruiting people with the expertise to help make Vanavevhu
self-sustaining.

To learn more about the organization or to donate or become a volunteer, visit www.Vanavevhu.org.

Story courtesy of Loyola magazine (Fall 2011).