In June this year, I travelled to Zimbabwe and visited Nechishala School. Initially, I wanted to tell the story of a day at school, the project we funded, and the things we saw. I had also planned to include a few quotes from Lovemore Nyoni, the person who first showed Joaquin Nechishala School ten years ago. The person this whole thing, in a way, takes its name from.
The truth is, I’m going to do very little of that. If you’re looking for something more technical, I’ll point you to this page . What I’d rather do here is share what I brought home from this trip. And to do that, I’d like to start with a question — the same question I was asked while I was in Zimbabwe: what, in your opinion, is the one thing that is absolutely essential for a school to exist? Take a moment. What would you answer?
I thought of teachers. Someone else said books, others thought of the building itself. My mum, rather cleverly, thought of the students. From our point of view, all of these answers make perfect sense. And yet, no one, myself included, thought of water.
If Zimbabwe taught me anything, if this question taught me anything, it is that we need to put things into perspective. A school cannot exist without water. Without water, a child cannot go to school. They cannot even survive. And so, if there is no water, the priority is to find it. Then comes the school. The same goes for teachers: what happens when your throat dries up after hours of teaching and there is nothing to drink? What seems to us such an elementary necessity that it barely deserves to be mentioned is, in Hwange, the first problem that needs to be solved.
Let’s take another example. At Nechishala, 28 girls and 9 boys sleep at the school. There are fewer boys because they can stay with families living nearby. The girls’ dormitory, on the other hand, is two hundred metres from the pit latrines. I was walking that road with the girls from the dormitory and started thinking about what it must be like at night. The darkness there is real, pitch black on moonless nights. Must be scary, I thought, walking this road with all the wild animals out there in the bush.
Lovemore, as if he had read my mind, turned to me and asked: what if there’s a man? The question hits me right in the solar plexus, like a hard kick that knocks the wind out of you and leaves you stunned.
What if there’’s a man
Until that moment, I had been thinking about what might be out there in the bush. In a second, Lovemore had forced me to look somewhere else.
When we first read the reports about the challenges of bushboarding at Nechishala, one figure stood out to us: one in three female students drops out of school because of unwanted pregnancies. To address the problem, the school introduced a matron — an older woman, respected by the community, who volunteers to sleep alongside the girls and accompany them to the bathrooms during the night. On average, she would wake up twenty times during a shift.
Then €8,500 was donated from Italy, and the matron could sleep again. The girls no longer had to walk those two hundred metres, because the bathroom is now at the end of the dormitory corridor.
This is how perspectives change.
Perhaps the problem is that we have become so unaccustomed to realities like these, even though they exist alongside our own, in the very same world. Yesterday, I walked the route from my home to my old high school. Over five years, I experienced all sorts of emotions along that road: anxiety, almost every day; fear of having to tell my parents about a terrible grade, quite often; happiness when a test went well, rarely. But never, ever, fear because there might not be enough water.
As I write this, girls are facing another night hoping they won’t need to go to the bathroom. And if their bodies insist, they can only hope to cross those two hundred metres without meeting anyone. They hope they won’t end up like a friend of theirs, who kept attending classes until her stomach became too big to hide her pregnancy.
What should stay with us is not pity. It is reality — a reality we need to face with an awareness of the privileges we have, and one that should perhaps make all of us stop for a moment and think about how we might change things.
And the truth — the shift in perspective — is that sometimes, very little is needed. A student’s semester fee is the “forty euros” you see highlighted in the bottom right corner of the blog’s homepage. Two hundred euros can buy a bicycle, saving a student from having to walk the kilometres between home and school. Six hundred euros, for the fourteen people who came to Zimbabwe with me through SiVola, mean that 28 girls can experience the feeling of taking a shower for the first time in their lives. They mean being able to sleep at night without fear of being raped on the way to the bathroom. They mean a fifty-year-old woman who can finally sleep again.
This is how perspectives change when you look at things from a different place. And sometimes, all it takes is moving a few metres.
Two hundred, for example.
All photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson.
