Nancy Tinoza: My Gifted Colleague

Foreword by Dominic Mhiripiri, USAP Zimbabwe

Within the Class of 2012 of USAP, we viewed our colleague Nancy Tinoza with the awe and admiration that her talents and personality merited. An overachieving scholar who broke records and amassed innumerable awards, Chamhembe, as everyone affectionately called her, was more than mere straight A’s on paper, or a list of accolades. She was humble, full of love, and never lost a sense of country-- of her roots--in spite of the faraway places her dreams took her. Indeed, for someone who rose of out the Glen View neighborhood of Harare, Zimbabwe, to eventually work for the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C., Nancy transcended very humble beginnings. For that alone she was an inspiration to many. Her death, a great tragedy, steals away from the Tinoza family, which Nancy greatly loved, friends and colleagues in all the places she lived and worked in, and from Zimbabwe, the country that bore and bred such a tremendously talented woman.

Nancy Tinoza

She leaves us great memories: her cheerful and friendly presence in the earliest USAP meetings (the kind participants have wearing brightly-colored, senior-year-of-high-school uniforms); her vivacious smile—a smile of genuine happiness; her love of her native country (the national banner draped around Nancy’s form is ubiquitous in photographs and postcards of her) and of the family that made her who she was; her energy and infectious zest for life; her accomplishments, which inspire peers and younger people alike (at the time of the tragedy, Nancy was on the verge of leaping from one great ship, the I.M.F., to another: a PhD program in Finance at a top-tier American university.); her love, which she shared all around.

We her friends will miss Nancy greatly, and are grateful for the storied and inspiring life she lived.

Nancy Tinoza: On Facebook

From The USAP Information Office

We have set up a Facebook page called Friends of Nancy Tinoza. Please feel free to check it out for more information and more insights into the life of this wonderful young woman whose life was tragically cut short.