A Walk into AEP's Homes

By Annabel Mumba
Annabel Mumba is AEP’s Donor Relations Coordinator in Zambia. She is a Scholarship Fund recipient, high school graduate, and also one of our Success Stories.

September is an exciting time for the entire AEP family. Every team member in Zambia participates in home visits where they get a chance to go out into the community to interview new and returning Scholarship Program applicants for the upcoming 2022 academic year.

From the top of one of Kafue’s hills, below is Kalundu View (meaning view from the hill) and Shikoswe in the distance.

Our girls and boys come from every corner of Kafue. Some come from Kafue Town and the Estates and many come from Shikoswe, the community were our after-school learning and leadership center (Amos Youth Centre) is located. However, the majority of our students come from the two poorest communities in Kafue, Zambian Compound, or ZC as it is known, and Kalundu View. And thanks to our Rural Outreach Program, several students come to us from a remote village called Chanyanya.

Zambia is still in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our center has been closed for almost two years now, but its doors have not been completely shut. Our staff has been very busy keeping the girls and boys engaged in their studies through a remote tutoring program and small groups have continued to gather for tutoring sessions led by our student teachers. We continue to reach out to the parents of our girls and boys with our weekly health calls too.

Home visits let us meet personally with each and every student, as well as their parent or guardian, so we understand the challenges they are facing in their homes, in their schools and in their community. During the time we spend with them, we get to hear all kinds of stories. We can relate to them because these are real stories told by our students. Real stories told by real people.

Our team had the opportunity to meet many new applicants, mostly Grade 7 students applying to our Scholarship Program for the first time. They enjoyed learning about their families and the reasons why they applied for sponsorship from AEP. And the staff also enjoyed catching up with the returning students, too. Joseph, a 10th grader at Shikoswe Secondary School, was eager to share with our team, “I miss the annual leadership camp and having lunch at the youth center with all my friends.” It was fantastic to note that all of our students are looking forward to the center being fully open.

This year, we had several new staff members participating in the home visits and interviews for the first time.

Benard Milanzi, AEP’s Entrepreneurship and Financial Literacy Program Coordinator, shared, “It was a great experience for me, especially since I am new to this. I loved seeing the impact of the organization from a staff perspective and not as a student like in the past. I remember walking into this home and the situation was bad. The parents of the applicant were struggling with paying rent for a one-bedroom home and ended up being caretakers for an unfinished house. The father is unable to find employment due to the pandemic and the mother is helping the family financially by washing clothes in people’s homes.” Benard was also able to share with the mother about our Entrepreneurship Program Women’s Empowerment Initiative. He is looking forward to engaging with her again.

For the second year in a row, our students are making videos for their sponsors and it sure was fun! For Benard, making videos was his favorite part of the entire process but it takes patience and humility -- two lessons Benard remembers the most.

Teddy Sakala, one of AEP’s Monitoring & Evaluation Coordinators, also learned many lessons from the home visits. He shared, “It made me appreciate my work and the impact that AEP has on the students. It opened my eyes to the details of their lives and to what they struggle with on a daily basis. It made me see that there is more to the faces that I see at the youth center. Despite them all coming for sponsorship, they all have a unique and different story to tell.”

Teddy continued, “Sometimes I had to cover a lot of distance just to reach the homes of the students. After getting back home, I would be exhausted. But after looking at the photos and videos of the students, I knew that I wanted to continue. It gave me a reason to smile.”

Peter and Francis, two of our high school graduates who are volunteering during their gap year before college, helped us photograph the students for their portraits and videos. Peter loves photography so this was a great opportunity for him to continue to develop his skills and Francis loves working with students. These two had a fantastic time filming the videos using their smart phones. Francis explained to me what it took for them to shoot a single video. “Making videos of young students for their sponsors is not really easy. Sometimes it would take up to three hours to film one video. I would explain to them how to do it several times, but they still would do things differently. Other students would start talking in front of the camera, and then suddenly stop in the middle or towards the end, and we would have to start over. For others, it was their first time to speak in front of a camera and they would get so nervous. I constantly encouraged them to be calm and do their best.”

Febby Choombe, AEP’s Read for Rose Special Education Program Manager, interviews a student.

This year, our Monitoring and Evaluation team updated our student database with a field entry for our staff members to record the GPS location of the students’ homes during the visit. Oftentimes, homes are not easily identifiable in the community and our staff spends hours trying to find a home. A GPS location will help us to easily track down our students and visit their homes in the future.

Febby Choombe, AEP’s Read for Rose Special Education Program Manager, has been going on home visits for two years now. She loves the visits and they are her favorite part of working for AEP. When asked what made this year more memorable, she responded, “Year in and year out, I enjoy meeting with these young people, and their parents, and listening to their stories, I love seeing what AEP is doing in their lives and it is amazing. These visits allow me and my fellow colleagues a glimpse into the lives of the lovely faces we see at the center.”

Christine, Violet and Andrew are new to the AEP team this year and they also enjoyed the home visits. I asked them if this is what they wanted to do every year and their response was a resounding yes!

Violet shared, “My perspective about my job has changed. In many ways, this was more than a home visit.”

Christine was thrilled to let me know the experience she took with her. “I, too, was once a student of AEP and I always had home visits and interviews at the center, but I never thought of how important the process was to the AEP team.”

Andrew, on the other hand, thought that the video production was his hardest yet most interesting task. He shared his experience with a joyful laugh, “This was not what I had imagined when I first started out. During the video making, I had to be very calm and pay attention to make sure that the student delivered the best message. I look forward to next year.”

It has been a month filled with trips up and down the dusty streets of Zambian Compound and the hilly community of Kalundu View to the busy streets of Shikoswe and into the homes of our many students. Visits worthy and needed, one that we all did not regret but appreciated.

Each knock and goodbye symbolized the chance for a young person to be awarded the opportunity to go to school. A hunger and thirst that AEP satisfies.