It all began with an invitation to play. ‘Every day there’d be more people,’ recalls Suzanne Clarke.
Suzanne Clarke is well known in Sonoma COunty for her work helping to restore native habitat for monarch butterflies through the North Bay Butterfly Alliance. Her work is groundbreaking – but her legacy actually began decades ago on a continent far away.
Clarke recently traveled back to Zimbabwe, where she had lived with her British diplomat husband Jonathan Clarke from 1980 to 1985. During the trip, she visited a preschool that she had started 45 years ago as part of a local literacy effort.
The school is still going strong today.
The area was Salisbury, Rhodesia until Independence in 1980, when it became Harare, Zimbabwe. Clarke’s then-husband was present at the Lancaster House negotiations in Rhodesia, and he oversaw their first internationally recognized free and fair elections in 1980 that won Zimbabwe’s independence.
Clarke gently laughs as she mentions taking her sons to visit her family in Indiana for her birthday while her husband oversaw a country’s first elections. She says she and her boys flew into Zimbabwe a few days later and began life in their new country.
“Independence Day was April 18th, 1980 and Bob Marley came and sang the song ‘Zimbabwe’ during the big celebration,” Clarke said. “My boys and I arrived on May 5th.”
Clarke said they were basically the first diplomats in Zimbabwe, and although she wouldn’t be working, she was a teacher and she wanted to do a bit more. She decided she wanted to help the domestic laborer families, especially the mothers and their children. And she did it by reaching out to the community with an invitation to play.
She spoke with her own domestic help and let them know that she was interested in inviting some of the mothers with young children to come and play with her two boys.
“We had, like, six kids come and their mothers,” she said. “Of course, I didn’t know how to talk to them but, you know, we got along just fine.”
Clarke was bringing out pens, pencils, paper and games like jigsaw puzzles.
“All of the children were really receptive and the mothers were so pleasant,” she said.
Word got out and more and more mothers began showing up with their children.
“Every day there’d be more people,” Clarke said.
One day, Hilda, the wife of the neighbor’s cook, came to check out what Clarke had going on. She spoke good English, could translate and was destined to become their first local teacher. The Clarkes sent Hilda to Adult Literacy Of Zimbabwe for training in teaching adult literacy. Hilda then taught literacy, basic math and tasks like how to tell time and make change.
They also held a mother’s group where they taught about childcare, hygiene and family planning. Clarke said they even taught the mothers to crochet, which they industriously took to and began making things like beautiful tablecloths to sell.
While the mothers were learning, their children were being cared for and they were learning too.
“The youngest were babies that were looked after while the mothers were in the literacy classes,” Clarke said.
Those that were a bit older were being taught skills they would need in order to eventually attend public schools.
“The preschool was really like an Early Head Start or, in other words, appropriate for the age,” Clarke continued. For instance, she said there was a group for those children who were learning to hold crayons and draw, do puzzles, play with blocks, balls and so forth. “The children learned how to use the toilets, wash hands, listen to stories, use scissors, or what would be necessary to join the public schools as they grew older.”
Clarke’s vision was given wings in 1982 when she met Mrs. Mable Mutara, a member of the Greendale Methodist Church in Harare. Mrs. Mutara managed to open up the church to the classes. They called the programming the Greendale Community Center and the preschool was simply called The Preschool.
Clarke was able to visit with Mrs. Mutara again while on her nostalgic trek back to Zimbabwe.
“I can’t believe how wonderful it was,” Clarke said. “She was my first volunteer and she would come every day and help me with the little ones. I know she took 2 buses to get to my house.”
While there, Clarke was also re-introduced to one of the school’s former students who had attended during those early days.
“Thami Mpala is 45 now,” Clarke said. “He works for the hydroelectric company and he’s a member of the Methodist Church Vestry. We worked out that he was one of the little boys, you know, in the preschool.”
Meeting Mpala was a beautiful way for Clarke to end her visit to the school that had started with an invitation for mothers and their small children to come and play. Clarke is glad that her literacy efforts live on, thriving in the hands of the community where it began.
David Templeton is the Community and Arts & Entertainment Editor of the Petaluma Argus-Courier. You can reach him at david.templeton@arguscourier.com.
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