Insight
The journey to Humwe Connect- We are all Mentors
“You probably never noticed,” she wrote, “but I was watching you, and I took so much of those lessons with me.”
This message came from Canada, from a young woman who had once shared an office with me for a few months. It made me realise that some of the most impactful work we do in our lives, we do without knowing we are doing it.
For the better part of my career, I travelled the length and breadth of the country, meeting many young Zimbabweans, from different backgrounds. As a result, many of these bright minds passed through my hands in one way or the other. They came for different programmes and initiatives. As youth ambassadors and advocates, who audaciously challenged us on issues around mental health, climate resilience, online safety and nutrition to name but a few. Through structures like the Junior Parliament; Junior Council, the Young People's Advisory Council, they came in boldly and confidently, with an admirable sense of purpose and self assuredness. They filled the space with a contagious optimism that made even the most hardened of us optimistic about the future.
But along with my awe and wonder came a deep sense of worry. Because once the projects ended everyone would go home. That was the design. We did our part, and our part had an end date. What unsettled me was what came after the end date, which was, for most of them, silence. I would find myself wondering about a particular young person months later, out of nowhere, and realise I had no idea what had become of them. Had anyone caught them? Had that bright light dimmed without anyone capturing their spark? Did any of them have someone, anyone, whose work it was to walk with them to the next level? Someone to make an introduction, to vouch for their name, to point them toward the skill or the opening that could have turned that bright moment into a beginning?
I did not have an answer. I am not sure I let myself sit with the question for as long as it deserved.
That's when the message arrived.
The young woman had been an intern in our office. She was not even my direct report. She was assigned elsewhere, and we simply shared a working space for nine months, with the ordinary proximity of colleagues who pass each other at the kettle, or lunch breaks, and trade a few words between meetings. When her time with us ended, she left, and not long after she relocated to another country. I assumed, as I had assumed about so many others, that this was where the silence would begin.
She wanted to thank me, she wrote, for the impact I had had on her life during those months. She had learned so much, she said, simply from being near the way I worked. And then she did something that stopped me: she began to describe me back to myself. She named things. Ways I carried myself, things I said, decisions she had watched me make and quietly filed away. She listed qualities I did not know I was demonstrating, lessons I had never sat down to teach. You probably never noticed, she said, but I was watching, and I took all of it with me.
I was deeply touched. And then, underneath that, something more complicated surfaced, and it has stayed with me ever since.
I had been mentoring her. For months. And I had not known.
She had received all of it by osmosis, by accident, by the sheer luck of having been placed at a desk near mine. Which meant that everything she gained, she gained despite the fact that no one, least of all me, had chosen for it to happen. And the thought that would not leave me was this: if I had known, I would have been deliberate. I would have been purposeful. I would have sat with her on purpose. I would have introduced her to people she could not otherwise have reached, and put my name behind hers in rooms she had not yet entered. I would have pointed her toward the skills her ambition still needed, and toward the internships, the fellowships, the first openings where those skills could be tested. Instead, she was left to gather what she could from the air. She got a fraction of what I could have given, and she got it by chance. What might she have received if any of it had been designed?
That is the urgency that sits at the heart of Humwe Connect.
The young people who passed through our programmes and then vanished, and the intern who gathered a mentorship no one had offered her, are consequences of the same absence. We have never been short of brilliant young people. We have been short of the deliberate act: someone choosing to stay, to guide, to hold the next door open on purpose rather than by accident. What actually moves a life forward is rarely advice alone. It is an introduction made, a name vouched for, a skill passed on, an opportunity pointed out. It is a person deciding to become a bridge, and being given somewhere to stand while they do it.
Humwe exists to make the accidental deliberate.
It exists so that the confidence I saw in those rooms does not have to expire when the programme does. So that a young person's future does not depend on the luck of standing near the right adult at the right time. So that talent anywhere in Zimbabwe can find not only a mentor but a network, a craft, and a door. And so that the professional who has so much to give does not have to discover, years later and in a message from another country, what they might have given on purpose.
I cannot go back and mentor those young people the way I now wish I had. I cannot make deliberate what has already happened by accident. But I can help build the thing that means the next generation will not have to rely on chance. A place where paths that cross are allowed to stay crossed. Where the watching and the being watched can finally be met with intention.
That is what Humwe means. Not that any of us rises alone, because none of us ever has. Only that, from now on, we choose to rise together, and we choose it deliberately.
Join Us! Humwe. Together.
By Elizabeth B. Mupfumira
Founder
This message came from Canada, from a young woman who had once shared an office with me for a few months. It made me realise that some of the most impactful work we do in our lives, we do without knowing we are doing it.
For the better part of my career, I travelled the length and breadth of the country, meeting many young Zimbabweans, from different backgrounds. As a result, many of these bright minds passed through my hands in one way or the other. They came for different programmes and initiatives. As youth ambassadors and advocates, who audaciously challenged us on issues around mental health, climate resilience, online safety and nutrition to name but a few. Through structures like the Junior Parliament; Junior Council, the Young People's Advisory Council, they came in boldly and confidently, with an admirable sense of purpose and self assuredness. They filled the space with a contagious optimism that made even the most hardened of us optimistic about the future.
But along with my awe and wonder came a deep sense of worry. Because once the projects ended everyone would go home. That was the design. We did our part, and our part had an end date. What unsettled me was what came after the end date, which was, for most of them, silence. I would find myself wondering about a particular young person months later, out of nowhere, and realise I had no idea what had become of them. Had anyone caught them? Had that bright light dimmed without anyone capturing their spark? Did any of them have someone, anyone, whose work it was to walk with them to the next level? Someone to make an introduction, to vouch for their name, to point them toward the skill or the opening that could have turned that bright moment into a beginning?
I did not have an answer. I am not sure I let myself sit with the question for as long as it deserved.
That's when the message arrived.
The young woman had been an intern in our office. She was not even my direct report. She was assigned elsewhere, and we simply shared a working space for nine months, with the ordinary proximity of colleagues who pass each other at the kettle, or lunch breaks, and trade a few words between meetings. When her time with us ended, she left, and not long after she relocated to another country. I assumed, as I had assumed about so many others, that this was where the silence would begin.
She wanted to thank me, she wrote, for the impact I had had on her life during those months. She had learned so much, she said, simply from being near the way I worked. And then she did something that stopped me: she began to describe me back to myself. She named things. Ways I carried myself, things I said, decisions she had watched me make and quietly filed away. She listed qualities I did not know I was demonstrating, lessons I had never sat down to teach. You probably never noticed, she said, but I was watching, and I took all of it with me.
I was deeply touched. And then, underneath that, something more complicated surfaced, and it has stayed with me ever since.
I had been mentoring her. For months. And I had not known.
She had received all of it by osmosis, by accident, by the sheer luck of having been placed at a desk near mine. Which meant that everything she gained, she gained despite the fact that no one, least of all me, had chosen for it to happen. And the thought that would not leave me was this: if I had known, I would have been deliberate. I would have been purposeful. I would have sat with her on purpose. I would have introduced her to people she could not otherwise have reached, and put my name behind hers in rooms she had not yet entered. I would have pointed her toward the skills her ambition still needed, and toward the internships, the fellowships, the first openings where those skills could be tested. Instead, she was left to gather what she could from the air. She got a fraction of what I could have given, and she got it by chance. What might she have received if any of it had been designed?
That is the urgency that sits at the heart of Humwe Connect.
The young people who passed through our programmes and then vanished, and the intern who gathered a mentorship no one had offered her, are consequences of the same absence. We have never been short of brilliant young people. We have been short of the deliberate act: someone choosing to stay, to guide, to hold the next door open on purpose rather than by accident. What actually moves a life forward is rarely advice alone. It is an introduction made, a name vouched for, a skill passed on, an opportunity pointed out. It is a person deciding to become a bridge, and being given somewhere to stand while they do it.
Humwe exists to make the accidental deliberate.
It exists so that the confidence I saw in those rooms does not have to expire when the programme does. So that a young person's future does not depend on the luck of standing near the right adult at the right time. So that talent anywhere in Zimbabwe can find not only a mentor but a network, a craft, and a door. And so that the professional who has so much to give does not have to discover, years later and in a message from another country, what they might have given on purpose.
I cannot go back and mentor those young people the way I now wish I had. I cannot make deliberate what has already happened by accident. But I can help build the thing that means the next generation will not have to rely on chance. A place where paths that cross are allowed to stay crossed. Where the watching and the being watched can finally be met with intention.
That is what Humwe means. Not that any of us rises alone, because none of us ever has. Only that, from now on, we choose to rise together, and we choose it deliberately.
Join Us! Humwe. Together.
By Elizabeth B. Mupfumira
Founder