"Mum you can't go to any other country, we need your skills in this town. You will simply enjoy Zimbabwean weather.....ideal for a retirement home in the future. Your Obedient son!
How could I not seriously consider Zimbabwe after Anele wrote this to me in the spring of 2014?! Anele was a Humphry Fellow at Emory's Rollins School of Public Health in 2010-2011. I was his host family that year. Back in 2008, I was a host for Getrube Ncube, also from Zimbabwe. So when the Fulbright Specialist program took off the limits for applying for a grant, I immediately thought of Africa, a continent I had never visited.
Anele put me in contact with the National University of Science and Technology in Bulawayo, his home town. In the summer I started to write the grant application with the Chairperson of the Department of Library and Information Science, Esabel Maisiri. We submitted the proposal to the U.S. Embassy in Harare. It was approved and moved on to Washington, DC. After some delays, the grant was approved in April 2015.
I will be teaching a course on Information Literacy to librarians who teach IL to their respective communities. I'm gathering material before I go and will jointly design the course with my counterpart at NUST. Luckily the course is scheduled to begin July 20, so we will have 2 weeks of planning together.
For a year I've been talking to lots of people to get a sense of the country- people who lived there when it was Rhodesia, CDC workers, Zimbabweans in Atlanta, Methodists with contacts at the Africa University and more. All have said how beautiful the country is and how resilient the people are. The American press does not cover Zimbabwe extensively so I've been reading blogs and books. I'm excited, nervous and looking forward to an amazing adventure.
