Achievment of the Week: Zulfa’s Story

We had a great workshop at Kibo last week where we began by recapping what we’ve learnt so far and then introduced a new topic, an opinion.

We started by thinking about the meaning of this and why it is important to have one. After a few minutes of thinking and hinting at some possibilities Ibraham contributed,  ‘ it is important to have one because if something bad happens you can do something about it.’ The MSMV co-ordinator of Kibo then continued and explained relatively what this could mean. She started off with something simple, a mobile phone, do you like it? Why? Then she exemplified the school, how about your teachers and the Head Teacher, do you think they teach well? She then went on to ask what about you’re country? An opinion would be if you thought it was being run well, or badly! We were literally dancing with excitement, this was a brilliant analogy and came straight from the teacher. I also noted that she retained a beaming smile on her face throughout the afternoon.

If this wasn’t good enough, after the workshop which focussed on experimenting with making marks and unique styles, we each produced a self portrait and asked the students to include an indicator of who they are, not just what they look like.  During the presentations Zulfa, who had at previously written in our baseline survey that she could not present herself in class, and could not express her feelings through art, proudly stood up on a chair and eloquently told her story. She had drawn a beautiful picture of her holding her baby sisters hand who had unfortunately died a couple of years ago. Following is the translation of her accompanying text.

‘I like walking with my young sister and I love having one, but I’m not lucky, I don’t have one. I did have but she died and I didn’t even get a chance to see her. When I came home from school in 2009 when I was in standard 1, I went home and found a lot of people with my parents. I asked them, where is my young sister? They told me that she had died. I cried a lot.’

All of the other presentations were excellent, however this one particularly struck a chord with our team. It was so encouraging to see such positive progress articulated through such a moving story.  We will be following Zulfa’s progress closely in the next few weeks and look forward to sharing many more achievements with you.