Miss Earth Zimbabwe re- engineers the idea of beauty pageants

FOr a long time, the idea of beauty pageants was about searching for the most beautiful woman in terms of their physical appearance and beauty. However, over the years organisers of beauty contests evolved to include as part of the competition, intellectual ability, talent as well as an assessment of a candidate’s personality and character among other things.

sandiswe Chikomborero Bhule is one of Zimbabwe’s reigning beauty queens, who recently returned from the philippines, where she represented the country in the Miss earth competition alongside 84 contestants from different parts of the world. sandisiwe did fairly well for the country as she brought home two medals; a gold medal for Miss Friendship and a bronze medal for Best teacher. One of the groups she was part of, the Africa group which was represented by 15 African countries also won gold for the best presentation on the environment. I was fascinated when she told me about the Miss earth beauty pageant. What I found most refreshing about the idea of Miss earth in general was the focus of the competition and the things which the contestants had to do in order to qualify for the title. Most of these had nothing to do with physical beauty!

to enter the competition, the organiser thandekile Muringa and her team were looking for candidates who displayed a good understanding of the environment. the task that lay ahead for the 15 finalists who took part in the competition was to draft a proposed document outlining projects they were going to undertake over a six week period to try and mitigate some of the environmental challenges in our communities.

“My project was titled ‘environment Matters’ and my aim was to engage with people physically and well as on social media to educate them on the importance of preserving the environment,” said sandisiwe. As part of her community projects, sandisiwe proposed to work with schools. she initiated the formation of an environment club at Kuwadzana primary school where she met once a week with over 30 pupils for the duration of the six weeks. Her objective was to teach the club members some of the things they could do practically to try and lessen damage to the environment. One of the challenges sandisiwe identified was plastic littering. plastic is one of the most dangerous forms of litter as it is not biodegradable. sandisiwe asked each one of the pupils to bring an old t-shirt from home and helped them to make a shopping bag out of the t-shirt. this exercise was a demonstration to the children that they had capacity to make a positive contribution to preserving the environment by encouraging their mothers to use shopping bags instead of a plastic bag the next time they went shopping. Alongside this, sandisiwe launched a plastic free October month on social media and also conducted a community dialogue in Kuwadzana. the projects which the candidates implemented were assessed weekly and medals were awarded to those who did well on a weekly basis. the Miss earth Zimbabwe competition culminated into a beauty contest on the evening of september 13 2014 in Bulawayo. “I had been very passionate as far as my projects were concerned and in terms of our weekly assessments, I had won quite a number of medals. However, my height is the bare minimum required in modelling and there were taller and more beautiful girls than me, by far!” said sandisiwe. When her name was announced as one of the seven finalists, she was very happy to have gone that far. “I got a shock when my name was called again as one of the four finalists. Judging from the other girls who had been called as well, I concluded that this was the furthest I had gone and I was very proud of myself for having come that far,” she added. As the announcer was concluding the event and getting ready to announce the winner, sandisiwe was busy scanning through the audience to try and locate her family members so she could walk to them soon after the event and head home. “that was when I heard my name being called out as the winner and I went completely numb!” she said. sandisiwe believes that it was the strength of her environmental projects as well as the passion she displayed in executing the activities that gave her a competitive advantage. “I am running an environmental project for the duration of my reign. My Motto is ‘20 years from now’. We have to do something today if we are going to see change 20 years from now. I will reach out to as many people as I can and encourage them to look after the environment which I believe God has entrusted us to steward,” she added.