Capacity building & Meeting at Tudor (Day 54)

Capacity building to improve awareness of discrimination 
My organization held a capacity building named “Recognizing and Tackling Oppression and Promoting Diversity”. This is a 3 hours short workshop and attendees are around 20 people that includes partner of the Ujamaa Center.

The assumption of the workshop is equity; every person should have equal opportunities and be treated equally. The famous video that treated discrimination reminds me. The video is “about an Iowa schoolteacher who, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in 1968, gave her third-grade students a first-hand experience in the meaning of discrimination”. She told the students, “The blue eye people are better than the brawn eye people”, made black handkerchief wrap around brawn eye students, and forbid the blue eye students playing with the brawn eye students. The results are obvious.

This video shows everyone has the willingness to take over power to other individuals or groups. In this workshop, the lecturer mentioned attitudes (e.g. assumptions and stereotypes) and power cause discrimination. Because we sometimes unaware of having the attitudes that cause discrimination, and this workshop improves awareness of my attitudes, I feel this workshop fruitful.

Joining Tudor community meeting
After the workshop finished, I went to Tudor, one of the slum area that exists Mombasa and currently we are planning fundraising to renovate the community center that is appropriate for nursery school. I joined the community meeting that held at the community center to have consensus to renovate the building if the fundraising succeed. At the meeting, the community people showed the strong necessity to renovate the building and give education especially for nursery and primary level.

The challenges of the people around the area are distance and cost. Especially they argued that nursery school costs Ksh 3,000/year and primary school costs Ksh 2,160/year for security, 6 examinations, games, tuition, and PTA, even if tuition is free in public school. They argued that 70% of the nursery level and 50% of primary level students are out of school because they can’t pay tuition.

The community center was build supporting by Mungano trust and the community is planning to start community managed school from next school year if the community center complete. Currently the building is uncompleted: they don’t have a floor and minimum number of chairs.

I made consensus with them that if we succeed fundraising that includes materials for building and facilities for schools, they will renovate the building by themselves by supporting Mungano trust support, and will keep clean the environment of the school and the playground that is now a garbage dump.

In front of the community center ― supposed to be playground 

Inside of the community center

Outside of the community center

Tudor area

Finally I went Maweni, Liconi area by crossing a ferry. This area has also a problem of land issues that government plans to expand the existed hospital and 3,000 of the households might have to evacuate. I feel deja vu of this problem.