ABSTRACT
Looking back, I can vividly remember a friend encouraging me to enrol for social work training after we finished our A levels in Zimbabwe in 1991. I had already made up my mind to pursue a career in teaching and, to be honest, at that time I did not really understand what social work entailed. After training as a secondary school teacher, I taught in rural, peri-urban and urban schools. I came across children and young people from a diverse range of backgrounds, from those who were growing up in well-off families to those who were the most socially deprived. This experience made me aware of the impact that socio-economic disadvantage can have on children’s well-being. Some of the children and young people were also caring for each other in sibling-led households; they were orphans who had lost both their parents to HIV/AIDS. (Child-headed families were a common feature in Zimbabwe in the early 1990s.)1 Part of my role as a teacher was to offer pastoral support to the school students, what was then referred to as ‘guidance and counselling’. I am sure that these experiences contributed to my desire to be a social worker. I also worked as a volunteer child counsellor at Childline in Harare for two years and undertook training in systemic counselling, an approach which draws on systems theory.2
