Neither Barbie nor the Transformers has much market share in a place like Zimbabwe, where a school teacher would have to work for a month to afford the most minimalist of Mattel’s offerings. More than 80 percent of the adult population is unemployed, life expectancy is just 34 years, and over 20 percent of the children are orphans.

Yet even in such dire circumstances, kids will be kids – and Zimbabwean’s sort through the detritus of towns and cities for Vaseline jar caps and shoe polish lids, for pieces of wire, discarded buttons, scraps of cloth and bits of yarn that became their dolls, their cars, their fantasies.

Awed by their imagination and spirit, in 2005, Dennis Gaboury, an American sculptor spending the year in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second largest city, sponsored a competition among the city’s orphans to encourage and reward their creativity. More than 250 boys and girls built dolls and trucks, motorcycles, airplanes and helicopters. And in the Spring of 2006, at special awards show, they all received prizes – movie tickets and back packs, beans and pencils, courtesy of local and international donors. Their toys were displayed in an exhibition mounted at the National Gallery, and the top four toymakers garnered something even more spectacular – an airplane ride over their own hometown.

But the orphans gained more than their prizes and their moment in the spotlight: The toys were sold in the United States that summer and from the proceeds from that sale, every child who participated took home a basket of food sufficient to feed a family for a month, notebooks and pencils for school, and enough money to pay school fees. For the first time in their lives, they glimpsed the possibility of earning money by working with their own hands. In a world where charity and handouts are the coin of the realm, they caught an inkling of dignity.

What began as a one-time competition morphed into an annual happening and Zimkids not only continued to provide food for orphans from across the city but rewarded the best toy makers from each neighborhood with a train trip to Victoria Falls and, in the Spring of 2008, a week-long adventure to an outdoor camp in the Matopos Hills just outside Bulawayo.

As support for his efforts grew back in the U.S., Dennis realized that he could do more than skim the surface of the lives of a large group of orphans with a food basket and the occasional outing. By committing their resources to a smaller group, in a single neighborhood, by creating meaningful relationships with each individual child and his/her caregivers, Zimkids could have a substantial and sustained impact.

Today, as a charitable trust under Zimbabwean law, Zimkids serves 160 orphans and growing in Pumula North, one of Bulawayo’s poorest and most underserved neighborhoods.