Scenes from January 21st, Day One
This is Ulenu from Malawi and Gao from Botswana looking at a photo of TLC Farm’s garden. Guess what? They are permaculturists!! We compared notes, and I might go visit some of their farms in a few months… a fun exchange.
This is a Ugandan dance and drum group, sharing a dance that teaches people about how to not spread HIV/AIDS. It was pretty amazing.
The ten elders: these men and women are Freedom Fighters. I went to a session called “Memories of Struggle and Contemporary Resistance” with speakers from Kenya, Cuba, Brazil, India, Palestine, Senegal, India and France. This group struck me the most. They fought in the Mau Mau rebellion. The woman in blue, Muthoni, spoke of how they “went into the forest” in 1952 until 1963, when Kenya won independence from Britain. If they had stayed at home during the day, they would have been captured, so they spent their days in the forest and their nights fighting for freedom. Muthoni spoke, though, about how the people who took the power after independence “resumed the colonial policies.” As another speaker said, Kenyans are not treated as human, they are treated as property. Kenya is a market, not a nation, he said.
This is Josephine Alabi, from Nigeria. She was keen on staying in touch to keep sharing issues about our two countries. She is a real networker, an intellectual who founded an NGO supporting women and children, and someone who wants to absorb as much information as possible. She kept saying, “we must be free with communicating.” Within the day, she had already emailed me about groups in Nigeria.
1 comment:
I have been truly touched by your stories of cross pollination and grass roots activism - Though I think you might have misspelled "Mau Mau".
Layeni! (The Zapotec word for Peace)
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