By Yero S. Bah
Community work and volunteerism expose volunteers to the grassroots challenges faced by society as well as trigger a sense of urgency in finding possible solutions to those challenges by social workers.
One such community volunteer is Mr. Alagie Lamin Camara fondly called ‘Uncle Spider’ of Jambanjelly village in Kombo South, West Coast Region.
As Uncle Spider explained, in contributing to the liberation of the African people, he needed to try something different which had warranted him to start his volunteer network where he mobilizes community youth to identify issues affecting his community since 2004.
The experienced community volunteer divulged this information to Mansa Banko Online recently via a WhatsApp interview.
He remarked: “We do what I called Information Education Communication (IEC) by creating the Falinkuta Drama Group to sensitize the community on issues surrounding teenage pregnancy, Dropouts in Schools, Drug Abuse as well as Skills Development and other complications at grassroots level.”
The Rural Development Program Officer said he managed to establish an Early Childhood Development Center in Jambanjelly with ninety (90) children, since 2006 and now the program has expanded into a Skills and Community Centre, adding it’s very important for people to set up the right environment for the upcoming generation.
“We should encourage self-reliance and sustainable development agendas; this way youth will stay in their communities to help development. In turn, the community should be able to provide them with the necessary skills,” Camara posited. But he observed that lack of such opportunities in the communities leads to irregular or regular migration in all forms as youth always have this “false hope” that the grass is greener on the other side of the Atlantic. He opined that from Primary to University education, the system doesn’t encourage Afrocentric ideologies or self-reliance but promotes Eurocentric views in Africa.
Uncle Spider again: “I mean we are using Eurocentric and Orientalists approaches towards education which make young people wanting to go away before they could achieve their dreams.
“Imagine all graduates are trying to leave the country to pursue their dreams in foreign lands, who will develop our communities?”
Camara, a former DJ at Palma Rima Hotel, noted that the fore-mentioned challenges are everywhere in the communities, saying people need collaborative measures to help combat these issues by preparing villagers to recognize these weaknesses and help enhance schools with skills development programmes as one way of solving it. He challenged that the education system should be more Afrocentric so that the youth would grow up with self-love, appreciate their products and also add value to them. He is currently working on two community projects targeting women and youth. The two projects are the Youth Engagement Strategy (YES) and Voice of the Youth and Genuine Engagement (VOYAGE) working with vulnerable women whose husbands have traveled through the ‘Back Way’, he informed. The projects help these women with Enterprise Development Skills like soap production, tailoring and home economics basics, according to Uncle Spider.
“My project is self-help. I produce homemade soap and sell it to support my initiatives. I am open to support and volunteerism as well as aware that external funding alone is no way to sustainable development,” he argued.
Social workers argue that, community work is the only profession that exposes one directly, to the naked grassroots challenges of people and communities in grand style.
