Zimbabwe trip changes Jackie’s life
Jackie Scott recently returned to one of her many homes — this time her mum’s in Dannevirke — for a brief sojourn between events in her busy life, one of which has been in Zimbabwe.
Jackie was born and raised in Dannevirke and has spent much of her life seeking a niche for herself. She has been helped hugely by her faith and membership of the Church and has been very much involved in its activities.
One of these has been the Sarah Jones Centre in Zimbabwe which looks after young women in trouble and the care of orphans whose parents have either died of Aids or abandoned them because of poverty.
In 2016 she was granted a year’s leave from her job at the Nelson City Council, the city and its Church having become her second home, to spend eight months at this centre in Bulawayo where she subsisted on a diet of choumoellier and maize porridge.
Life was very tough. Zimbabwe — once called the foodbasket of Africa — was then very poor under Prime Minister Mugabe. Unemployment was 90 per cent, inflation astronomical ($50 billion Zimbabwean dollars couldn’t even buy a loaf of bread), infrastructure like roads was neglected and security was limited.
But Jackie loved her life in the Sarah Jones Centre which became her third home and she was lucky to win an Australian and New Zealand Travel Hero Award plus a prize of $5000 which she ploughed back into the centre.
Jackie returned to New Zealand in 2017 to work again for the Nelson City Council.
In 2018 she decided to go to university in Christchurch to study media as she had found a capacity for public speaking but the course was not what she had hoped for and after a term she stopped, preferring to opt for a new course on communication starting in 2019.
With the help of her Church friends she travelled back to Zimbabwe, now under a new government, only to discover the economy had collapsed, inflation was out of control and there were drastic shortages of fuel and food.
She visited a village called Ngazimme and its Church at Bulawayo’s dump which had been established two years ago, the 600 residents building their homes and recycling refuse from its rubbish. She found poverty had hit so hard the rubbish bins were being intercepted in the city by starving residents and this source of living for the villagers was diminishing.
Visa restrictions cut her visit to three months but she again really enjoyed the Sarah Jones Centre and the charity Kiwi Link which drills bores for wells and supports villagers in the countryside. Now she is off back to Nelson where the Church has found her employment for the summer holidays.
Jackie loves the people of Africa — their ever present joy of life despite the poverty — and she believes her African experiences have taught her patience and resilience in a way she could never have experienced in New Zealand.