This week the organization coordinated a clean up campaign with a local organization called Save a Fishie. Community members were invited to come out in their numbers to clean up their area of residence. In one day we managed to collect over 1700 kilograms of waste which was recycled or safely disposed. It was also important to establish a culture of cleaning up after ourselves as a community, which is important for sustainable change.
Toyota also visited the informal settlement and donated a second round of school shoes to the children in addition to the Soweto Bikers. In addition to the shoes, they also donated socks, sanitizers, toys, and soaps. Hygiene is very difficult to maintain in Ezimbuzini due to lack of access to clean running water, so the waterless sanitizers will definitely come in handy.
I have been facilitating afternoon activities with the little toddlers (ages 0-6) hanging from maths, English language, story time, arts and crafts, and culture and heritage. I enjoy working with the little ones which largely contrasts the admin side of a non-profit such as drafting proposals, monitoring donations, and distributions, tracking beneficiaries, and applying for grants. It is easy to get trapped in the bureaucracy of the administrative side of Human Rights, but interacting with different communities firsthand serves as a reminder and a moral compass for the field.
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Hi Roli,
This hands-on community engagement seems amazing, and I totally agree that sometimes human rights, as we look at it through an academic lens often, can feel disconnected in its implications, but this seems like such a good way to ground some of your work in tangible community support and combine lots of different areas (public health, education, childcare) in order to better understand the bigger picture!
Hi Roli,
I hope you are well!
I loved getting to learn about the different types of work that you have been engaging in. This sounds like a lot of different skills and community members are involved, which sounds so amazing! This multifaceted approach really resonates with me as it helps me understand that community engagement doesn't just take one form or practice, but is sustained by a web/network of multiple different pillars of support.
Hi Roli,
Your project sounds amazing, and I'm in awe of your ability to manage two vastly different activities--teaching children and handling nonprofit administrative work--at the same time. The project sounds like it is advancing real, durable change in Ezimbuzini; I can't wait to see where you take this work in the future.
You're right that we can sometimes lose the forest for the trees when only looking at such deeply human issues from a semi-detached administrative perspective. I wonder whether this goes both ways: do you think focusing only on the nitty-gritty can blind us to the structural challenges that lie behind poverty/disease/conflict etc.? It sounds like your approach--keeping both sides of the work in mind simultaneously--might be an optimal middle ground.