AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION OF DR. ROSEMARY MUSANDIPA

My name is Doctor Rosemary Musandipa nee Musoko. I am the fourth born of my father and mother in a family of nine children (four boys and five girls). I was born of a polygamous father who had fourteen children in total, ultimately I am the eighth born in that big family. I grew up in colonial Rhodesia, where women and girls counted for nothing except to bear children, do the housework, and work the fields.  One thing certain is I grew up surrounded and sheltered by the love of my parents, my grandmother, my siblings, and all adults in my village of Musoko in Seke, in the district of Goromonzi in the then Rhodesia now Zimbabwe. The memories of my early childhood education are that it took place in my grandmother’s hut in the evenings whilst shelling corn, peanuts, pounding corn for mealie-meal, or grinding peanut butter, or just listening to the tales of the adults while sitting by the warm evening fire. The adult women in my life would take turns to tell us a story every evening with some moral lesson or value, all the while we would be working. This made our chores seem more like fun, light, in the form of child play yet, at the same time gave us valuable lifelong lessons.

My primary education was at Marikopo Primary School, my local Salvation Army village school from Sub-Standard A then up to Standard Six. During this time (1962-1969) all my teachers were males except for one year in Standard Four in 1967 when a female taught me. I attribute my basic female education to my mother, my grandmother and women from my village. Mostly it consisted of personal hygiene, how to care for my home, become a good wife, basically all the traditional female submissive duties. For my two years of secondary education I attended Howard Secondary School, another Salvation Army institute, most of my teachers were males (mostly missionaries) except for my Math teacher who was a female Canadian Salvation Army Officer. That was instrumental in shaping me as a strong woman of faith, nurtured my curiosity to learn, while becoming an avid reader, but also still questioned my position in a world that did not nurture me as a complete human being because I was female. After those two years in secondary school I prematurely trained for three years to be a primary school teacher at the same institution. My father could no longer afford my secondary education as he had a huge family to educate, clothe, and feed. As a result, I started teaching from the time I was 18 up to the age of 35 when I decided to advance myself academically. I enrolled with Cambridge so that I could complete my high school certification. All I needed to do was pass five O’level subjects including English. At the end of 1989 I met with such success that I decided to go further. In 1993 I sat my two A-level exams and passed again with flying colors. However, I could not go further as by 1993 my then husband was unemployed. Early 1994 he was living and working abroad so I shelved my own educational plans to provide a stable home for our five growing children. By the end of 1996 he was back in Zimbabwe and I resuscitated my quest to have a college degree. Early 1997 I was accepted by the University of Zimbabwe and enrolled in the Educational Administrative bachelor’s degree. Needless to say with my first degree I saw the sky only as the limit to what I could achieve as well as broaden my children’s horizons in the process. After my first degree things were no longer the same politically, economically and socially in Zimbabwe. Many changes were taking place and I did not want to be left behind. I decided to further advance myself academically and migrated to the United States for my Master’s Degree in Educational Administration.

Additional background information would suffice here. I got married in the year 1977 and my eldest son was born towards the end of that year followed by four more siblings (a boy and three girls), born in 1980, 1983, 1985, and 1986 (notice that in less than 10 years I had five children!). My maternal goal was to have my children before I turned 30 years of age and that was realized a few months after I turned 31 when I gave birth to my fifth and last born in November of 1986. My children are by now young adults who are either still doing their first degrees or completing, or getting married. The transition from Zimbabwe to the United States had been a great challenge to my career ambitions and personal relationship with my children. Initially I was forced to leave my four younger children in Zimbabwe, but am happy that we were reunited in less than two years and soon after I became their primary provider, due to the disintegration of our 27 year old marriage with their father. That is another book on its own and will not delve into that aspect of my life in this introduction.   

The early years of my life were happy (though riddled by poverty) in the plains of the rural areas of central Zimbabwe. My secondary and teacher-training years were carefree years spent ensconced in the mountains of Chiweshe in a missionary school to the north of Zimbabwe. Most of my life as a career married woman and mother were spent in different environments varying from rural, urban, semi-urban, to farming and mining communities. I have vivid memories on how people in Zimbabwe (both urban and rural communities) survive the cruel and harsh realities of life. People in Zimbabwe survived the colonial era, the many droughts that increased economic hardships, the liberation war (to which I lost my eldest brother-Rhoderick), and the early civil war after independence, but nothing had prepared us for the unforeseeable turmoil of the HIV/AIDS pandemic from the mid 1980s onward. I am not sure how many family members I have personally lost to this pandemic as well as young students and teachers that I taught and worked with. All I know is I was affected adversely on personal, professional, and social levels in unparalleled ways.

In all my first years as a teacher I believed in changing the lives of the students I taught. I worked in various capacities, as a class teacher, senior teacher, teacher-in- charge of the infant department, and finally as a school head. I enjoyed a lot of fulfillment every year just seeing my kids advance to the next level and most of all seeing them develop abilities to read, write, and enumerate, whilst developing into full fledged and engaged citizens. At the dawn of our independence in 1980 we enjoyed an influx of students into the education system with the introduction of free primary education. Many countries funded a lot of initiatives in the new nation, but the Lancaster House agreement of 1979 recommended lots of changes at the end of the decade.  However, by the mid 1990s at the recommendation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) the implementation of the economic structural adjustment programs (ESAP) derailed the good results of our brief political and educational independence, as we were not economically independent yet.

At the same time many nations internationally were starting to cope with the identification and onslaught of HIV/AIDS, and Zimbabwe was among them. ESAP probably contributing more to the hardships of most Zimbabweans, and the continued years of failed rains contributed to the economic turmoil. Adding to an already struggling national development were the harsh realities of unstable politics that led to the demobilization of the Zimbabwe liberation fighters getting thousands of unbudgeted bonuses as well as our unplanned participation in a war that I never understood of the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1997. I contend these took an insurmountable toll on our economy as our president at times made overnight excutive decisions by himself.

Working with students from the mid 1990s became a struggle as schools were losing girls not only because of the economic hardships of ESAP but also to the HIV/AIDS epidemic which was primarily affecting their parents and guardinas. Girls were dropping out of school to care for their ailing parents and orphaned younger siblings or members of their extended families. By the late 1990s girls themselves were beginning to fall victims to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. From that time as an educational leader in Zimbabwe I was affected terribly. To cope I started started looking for a paradigm that could help me inject some desired change in behaviors, attitudes, and lives of students that I came into contact with on a daily basis as well as the young inexperienced teachers straight from training colleges.

I so much wanted to make sure that youths changed their sexual behaviors, social interactions, their values, and their attitudes on how they related as males and females. Undeniably HIV/AIDS is a widely stigmatized disease. It was not easy for me to simply accept and never discuss these important issues with neither students nor teachers. On a personal level I was very conflicted. I started questioning a lot of things I had merely taken for granted. I felt I needed a paradigm to guide my beliefs and philosophy in teaching. Personally, a paradigm involves how we see things; for instance, when something ends, something else begins, so endings are beginnings and beginnings are endings. This to me translated into the need to start involving youths as active members of their educational processes and that meant the end of viewing students as just passive consumers of education, but also making the milestone of students becoming active consumers of education. My view was based on the understanding that they were the ones growing up in a world affected and forever changed by HIV; as such they needed to be actively involved.

First and foremost I knew educational administrators needed to identify young children’s needs regarding HIV/AIDS prevention and how to translate needs into significant actions. As I considered and still consider myself to be an educational advocate for young people I perceive all successful advocates as being able to identify a paradigm in the context of a statement or discussion and use it to reinforce or change an opinion/s. As a result my idea to actively involve students in HIV/AIDS prevention was born that early on in the mid 1990s.

For me recognizing the difference between need and action is the most common paradigm to use to initiate advocacy for an idea, or procedure. I strongly feel that the discrepancy between (policy) what should be and what is practiced (action) to arrive at an intended outcome is fundamental to artful and successful advocacy. In pursuit of realizing this goal I realized my personal shortfalls as an educational administrator hence my journey all the way to America to work with the educators who unbeknown to them had taught me at a distance. Educators such as Sergiovanni, Taylor, Fulani, Cohen and many others were instrumental in my aspiring to study abroad. I knew, therefore, I had to change myself before I could expect to be able to influence others to change. Thus, upon this paradigm I based my quest to advance academically, and to ultimately engage in educational research, in order to argue academically and knowledgeably for my beliefs in HIV/AIDS prevention, for all people and the under privileged learners I taught.

There are some desired behaviors expected of the youth in order to control the spread of HIV/AIDS, and if educational leaders do not act on these desired outcomes then the needs of the youth would always remain as needs until actions are implemented. Bearing in mind my paradigm that if HIV/AIDS prevention education was to become effective something else has to end in order for something new to begin. People’s ‘normal’ attitudes, cultures, values, skills and knowledge, therefore, have to be flexible. I strongly believed for people to deal with the HIV/AIDS menace in a way that addresses the needs of modern day youths especially those born in the era defined and forever changed by HIV/AIDS people have to respond accordingly. Many people’s lives are being put into risk because leaders continue to hold on to morals, values, and traditional attitudes that are rigid when it comes to discussions on sex and sexuality. As educational administrators seem not recognize the incredible threats and pressures that today’s youth are growing under, that they are exposed to through the media, the movies, social media, technology, peer pressures, and cultural superimpositions. These are real concerns in today’s youths that people of my generation never dealt with while growing up.

Aadmittedly today’s administrators are faced with the dilemma of whether to do what is morally right or what is humanely acceptable. Administrators are expected to offer high quality learning to a larger, more diverse and dispersed student population than ever before, yet at the same time continue to hold on to values, and morals of people who were never faced with the threats that today’s youth are confronted with. Arming and teaching youths how to deal with their sex and sexuality does not encourage them to indulge in fact it should be perceived as empowering and educating them according to their present day needs. They need skills to be able to make decisions without fear, stigma, discrimination, moral obligations but with the ability to do what is right for them. Only when educational administrators as leaders are able to translate needs into actions can leaders meet the needs of today’s youths proactively.

Granted that today's youths will be tomorrow’s leaders and are occupying leadership positions left vacant by their parents and guardians in their lives why should educational, political, and religious leaderships continue to hold on to policies and values that subject today’s youths to moral obligations without acknowledging that these youths need life skills and knowledge to survive the harsh environments that surround them today. They need to be able to make decisions as whether to use or not to use protection, to make decisions of being faithful or not, and as well as to say ‘no’, and have the word ‘no’ respected for what it implies, and respect each other in their relationships. They need to have choices and not just follow directions like sheep to the slaughter.  

Political, educational, and religious administrators need to realize that without followers they cannot be

leaders, therefore, incorporating the ideas of followers into HIV/AIDS prevention strategies should be viewed

 as complementary to both leaders and followers. Youths have a personal responsibility to respond to the

challenges of HIV/AIDS, in their personal lives and by setting examples to their peers. They are the ones

most vulnerable because they are in the defenseless and romantic stages where they look at life through rose

tinted glasses, youths do not know the risks of HIV/AIDS, but can be very effective agents of change as they

have very minimal inhibitions.

Unless educational administrators, educators, and students regard themselves as affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and acknowledge that there is a possibility that they themselves or a loved one might become infected at any time, research might bring as many recommendations that might not become actions. Students must be valued as a resource in and of themselves, and as crucial allies in the common struggle to overcome and finally eradicate HIV/AIDS. There is a strong need to work together with them to overcome the threats posed by the HIV/AIDS pandemic on their and more approaching generations.

Hopefully this little passionate passage enlightens you on why I personally feel I should play an active role in HIV/AIDS administration and carry the responsibility of preserving today’s youth our tomorrow’s leaders.