Spent a couple of months working at the Miss Earth Zimbabwe trust. I’m shocked that I’m only blogging about it now. Ah well, better late than never I suppose. I had no love for pageants until I started working with one. All the hard work that goes into the behind-the-scenes gave me an appreciation of the modelling industry as a craft. What inspired me to join the Miss Earth Zim team is that I’m all for women that are intellectually switched on. The tagline is, “Beauties for a cause.” The women that partake in this pageant must look good, think fast and work hard. They had to do practical environmental projects for six weeks.
For six weeks, I watched these women pursue their projects with vigour and relentlessness. They were hitting headlines on a daily. They mobilised their communities and implemented sustainable projects. They raised extensive awareness on environmental issues. This is by no means an easy feat. Environmental issues are sidelined in Zimbabwe whereas they could possibly alleviate the unemployment problem. Effective waste management can generate income. We don’t have a booming industrial sector but we can recycle to provide raw materials to industrial sectors that are operationally.
The local Friday newspaper then wrote a distasteful review of the pageant. Reading the piece was as exciting as watching a Highlanders game against Dynamos. The pre-requisite of entering the pageant is that the applicant must be pursuing a degree or already having graduated. So the local publication slammed the models’ intelligence based on one question they had been asked on stage whereas as a tabloid they print crap plagued with typos and grammatical errors. The pot calling the kettle black.
We still have a long way to go. Pageants and environmental issues are a hard-sell in Zimbabwe but from the projects that the girls did you can already see strides in the right direction. Entering this pageant requires genuine passion for environmental issues. Its not about being tall and thin, its about being hardworking. The Road to Miss Earth Zimbabwe was exhilarating but we got through and Sandiswe Bhule is Miss Earth Zim 2014. I wish her a rewarding riveting reign.
