Tererai Trent

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  • 06 September 2011 For that moment when you want to reflect on what's important in your life, grab a special Tinogona coffee/tea mug and enjoy its contents!
  • 18 August 2011
  • 06 December 2012 The Sound of Change Ping. Ping. Ping. That’s the sound of text messages hitting my mobile phone, day and night, after navigating over the long dirt roads and open blue skies thousands of miles away from my home, in Africa. With each ping, my smile beams more brightly, my step has more spring and my bliss is boundless. And, I am reminded of the words of the soulful R&B singer Sam Cooke “A change is gonna come.” For you see, my dream of bringing a better education to children in my rural village of Matau, Zimbabwe, is soon to come true. A gaggle of grandmothers - Gogos in my native term, tease me with these texts, feeding me morsels of news about the progress on the Matau Primary School project. This will create a brighter future for nearly 4,000 children and 125 teachers. "A brand new school is now standing, it almost seems like I am dreaming," Gogo Sande says in her text. The next morning, before I have recovered from my joy of reading Gogo Sande's text, I get two more: "Tererai, my daughter could not read and write and died leaving orphans under my care. Now they can read at home and I get to participate in their reading, it has never been heard of until Matau Project. It's a miracle.” Gogo Kawocha "I saw the new desks and chairs arriving, our children have hope for a better future,” Gogo Kambuzuma My heart is brimming over with affection and tears come to my eyes as I picture these grandmothers, walking around my village, tracking down the young men and asking or paying them a few cents to relay their messages to me via text on their mobile phones. I am humbled knowing that these women have had little to no schooling themselves yet they share the same enthusiasm of children awaiting their first day of school. At this time of year, when we express our gratitude, I want to bestow mine on these grandmothers. I thank them for reminding me that hope springs eternal. I can hear them saying, “Naysayers of Africa, pass on through. Your stay is temporary, like the shift in shadows under the clouds of the African sky.” Change is gonna come. Progress is on the horizon. Can you feel it? Tinogona! It is achievable.
  • 06 September 2011 For that moment when you want to reflect on what's important in your life, grab a special Tinogona coffee/tea mug and enjoy its contents!
  • 08 July 2012 I arrived late in the evening announced, by early morning the sound of the drum had alerted my homecoming. I had gone home to visit my mother and see the progress on the construction of my childhood school. I am teary with joy as I write. The school looks transformed, beautiful beyond anything I expected. Save the Children and the community had been working hard and their sweat is visible. Some of you may remember the ground breaking ceremony, the brick molding by the community, the construction of the foundation. Today the school has walls and a roof! I captured some photos to share the journey of building our school. “A picture is worth a thousand words.” The building committee took me on a tour of the school. It was a precious moment. While both the community and teachers were happy to share the progress, it was the kids that captured my heart—their stories, their smiles, and joys are what keep me going. I had good time with the kids. I grew up with most of the kids’ grandparents. From every face of these kids, I see their grandparents, whom most were my friends and neighbors. It’s weird and sobering—to see the same smiles and laughter I knew from their grandmothers and grandfathers. Kudos to Save the Children, my community, the Ministry of Education and the local rural council for a job well done! I am inspired and I hope you will be inspired too. See the photos!
  • 28 September 2012 In Praise of Storytellers Earlier this week, I had a chance to catch up with Nick Kristof, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times and co-author of the best-selling book “Half the Sky.” As some of you may know, Nick finger-tapped my story into his poetic prose on the opinion pages of The New York Times back in 2009. We were both invited, along with Carolyn Miles, CEO of Save the Children and Jeffrey Walker, Chair, Frontline Health Workers and the MDG Health Alliance, to participate in a Save the Children-sponsored panel discussion on where the world stands today in meeting three of the Millennium Development Goals – reducing child mortality rates; improving maternal health; and achieving universal primary education. (These and five other important goals were agreed upon by leaders in rich and poor countries in 2000 and have an end date of 2015. NBC’s special foreign correspondent Ann Curry moderated the panel. (Ann is to be recognized for her unwavering commitment to covering humanitarian and development issues.) Right down the street from our event in New York City, corporations, policymakers and non-governmental organizations were engaged in similar conversations at the Clinton Global Initiative and, later in the week, at the UN Global Summit. Inevitably, in all these discussions, and even at our own breakfast event, numbers and data will creep in. 34 million: the number of African children who went to school for the first time between 1999 and 2006. 64 million: the number of children globally still out of school. As a professional evaluator of development programs, I value math and statistics. They help us determine what is or is not working, as well as how close we are to reaching our goals. But facts and figures don’t show the whole picture. They don’t tell us that a cattle-herding girl in a rural village in Zimbabwe, if given the chance to go to school, would keep going all the way through to get her PhD. When someone in the audience asked Nick how he manages not to get discouraged or downtrodden after all these years of seeing such strife on-the-ground, he said there are sad stories to be told, but for every sad story, there are many more hopeful ones - stories of mothers and women who do extraordinary things every day to make change happen in their own communities. (He could have been speaking about the mothers and women of Matau.) Nick said their stories aren’t commonly told by traditional media outlets. So in praise of the storytellers, will you join me in sending a tweet or a Facebook post to @nickkristof or @anncurry, thanking them for telling the hopeful stories of the voiceless, for keeping these issues on the minds of millions of Americans, and for inspiring us – you and me -- to work together to help 61 million children who are still out of school today write down and realize their dreams of getting an education, too.
  • 06 December 2012 The Sound of Change Ping. Ping. Ping. That’s the sound of text messages hitting my mobile phone, day and night, after navigating over the long dirt roads and open blue skies thousands of miles away from my home, in Africa. With each ping, my smile beams more brightly, my step has more spring and my bliss is boundless. And, I am reminded of the words of the soulful R&B singer Sam Cooke “A change is gonna come.” For you see, my dream of bringing a better education to children in my rural village of Matau, Zimbabwe, is soon to come true. A gaggle of grandmothers - Gogos in my native term, tease me with these texts, feeding me morsels of news about the progress on the Matau Primary School project. This will create a brighter future for nearly 4,000 children and 125 teachers. "A brand new school is now standing, it almost seems like I am dreaming," Gogo Sande says in her text. The next morning, before I have recovered from my joy of reading Gogo Sande's text, I get two more: "Tererai, my daughter could not read and write and died leaving orphans under my care. Now they can read at home and I get to participate in their reading, it has never been heard of until Matau Project. It's a miracle.” Gogo Kawocha "I saw the new desks and chairs arriving, our children have hope for a better future,” Gogo Kambuzuma My heart is brimming over with affection and tears come to my eyes as I picture these grandmothers, walking around my village, tracking down the young men and asking or paying them a few cents to relay their messages to me via text on their mobile phones. I am humbled knowing that these women have had little to no schooling themselves yet they share the same enthusiasm of children awaiting their first day of school. At this time of year, when we express our gratitude, I want to bestow mine on these grandmothers. I thank them for reminding me that hope springs eternal. I can hear them saying, “Naysayers of Africa, pass on through. Your stay is temporary, like the shift in shadows under the clouds of the African sky.” Change is gonna come. Progress is on the horizon. Can you feel it? Tinogona! It is achievable.
  • 02 March 2012 Up on the Treetop Technology has reached my sleepy remote village in Zimbabwe. Barely. But it’s there. You won’t find it on the ground, though. You have to climb up the tree and catch it. That’s what I had to do to take a telephone interview on a recent visit to my home. It was a balancing act, holding myself steady against the branches, while I held on to the cell phone. Throughout the conversation, I managed to answer the interviewer’s questions. Between the static noises and what I could manage to say while perched unsteadily on a tree, I can only hope that nothing was “lost in translation.” While I’m excited about the changes that are coming to my village, I love seeing the parts of it that have stayed the same. I love seeing the red soil that as a child, my naked feet had walked on; the fields that I used to take our cattle to graze on; and most of all the men, women and children whose nobility, in the face of challenges, never fails to inspire me. In the future, perhaps the people in Matau won’t have to climb a tree to make and take a telephone call. Perhaps the internet can finally reach the village and show my community how the rest of the world lives. But for now, I love Matau for what it is, a quiet village known for its dreams.
  • 18 October 2011 Could not help showing this picture. These 2 guys thought if little girls in Africa can carry 5 litres on their heads, they can also do it. It was interesting to watch them!
  • 17 February 2012 The moment I saw the NEWLY constructed borehole and the Water storage tank I knew something bigger than myself was in the making…...."A Miracle" This is the Tinogona t-shirt money! The water storage tank holds 5000 liters of clean and safe water for drinking. Access to water, let alone clean and safe water is something that many of us take for granted, unfortunately many children in the world die from water borne diseases because all they have is dirty water from rivers and unprotected wells. This is a miracle! Today Matau Primary School has defeated Cholera and typhoid, life-threatening diseases facing the country. Thanks for the support!
  • 08 July 2012 I arrived late in the evening announced, by early morning the sound of the drum had alerted my homecoming. I had gone home to visit my mother and see the progress on the construction of my childhood school. I am teary with joy as I write. The school looks transformed, beautiful beyond anything I expected. Save the Children and the community had been working hard and their sweat is visible. Some of you may remember the ground breaking ceremony, the brick molding by the community, the construction of the foundation. Today the school has walls and a roof! I captured some photos to share the journey of building our school. “A picture is worth a thousand words.” The building committee took me on a tour of the school. It was a precious moment. While both the community and teachers were happy to share the progress, it was the kids that captured my heart—their stories, their smiles, and joys are what keep me going. I had good time with the kids. I grew up with most of the kids’ grandparents. From every face of these kids, I see their grandparents, whom most were my friends and neighbors. It’s weird and sobering—to see the same smiles and laughter I knew from their grandmothers and grandfathers. Kudos to Save the Children, my community, the Ministry of Education and the local rural council for a job well done! I am inspired and I hope you will be inspired too. See the photos!
  • 19 October 2011 In South Africa just before my speaking to the girls!