Productive Activity during the Lockdown is important to prevent social problems
My name is Suzan Lagum I am a changemaker and social entrepreneur in Uganda ever since in 2017 I joined the Butterfly Project who empower youth talents so that they can transform the lives of rural people in their home villages.
I live in Pader district which is in the Northern part of Uganda, and l have a project which I call the Ideas Forum, which I am running both in Kampala and in my home village. In Kampala l focus on a slum area called the Acholi Quarter and in neighbouring areas such as Kasenyi and so on. With the ldeas Forum I partner with many Local leaders like the Local Chairman LC1 and we discuss how youth can be involved in creating change. I started this when I was in form one (S1), and I am now in form four (s4) though since the pandemic, we have not been allowed to attend school.
We all returned home in March this year, but because I am a change maker, l came up with an idea of starting up a dance project for the village kids to keep them busy. We are all in the lock down and most of the kids have nothing to do except going to the garden (farming), eating food, shooting birds, and other negative activities. I want to create change and help tackle some other social problems like early pregnancy in girls, child abuse, drug abuse, etc. All these problems are the impacts of the COVID19 this year 2020 and our aims are to bring all kids together and we try to do something which is proactive and valuable to their life so that we have a better future as we wait for the pandemic to go. Lastly we are focusing to improve on their talents since they have no opportunity to demonstrate them when the schools are closed.
In the dance project we do what we call “creative dance”, teaching messages about early marriage prevention and child abuse through this medium. Members of the dance group gain self confidence and we believe that this helps them avoid being part of these negative activities. We do this every day for 45 minutes in the afternoons after everyone has come back from their gardens.
The dance takes place after athletics training, which is another initiative that we have undertaken in Pader town to help make the lives of the village children more productive. For this we have teamed up with Ogom Telela, a village about 12km from Pader, where two other Butterfly members are based. Our training takes place every day at the Pader Airfield with our local kids ranging from 10 to 14 years of age. Before the first training took place, I went with my friend Genesis (also a Butterfly member) and my brother Ballam to recruit athletes. We talked to parents explaining the benefits of what we are doing and why we are doing it. We also had a chat with local leaders to grant us permissions to do this while we are all in lock down.
During the training, we have to follow all the protective measures needed like social distancing and washing hands regularly so that we protect the Presidential directives. In Ogom Telela, we have one of our social entrepreneurs called Innocent Rubangakene. He is taking the leads of the athletes when they are at Ogom Telela Primarywhere they are also training all evenings. We do this, so that our fellow brothers and sisters have something proactive in their lives throughout the situations.
Our aim is that the Pader team shall participate in the Platinum League Kids Athletics event which is run by Chrysalis Uganda and Coach to Coach, Kapchorwa. And for the Dancers we are hoping to organize a creative dance to teach our village mum and dad and the entire world that, we young people can really do something in this world.
We are planning to print out twenty eight T shirts for our athletes for their training, and this will help motivate them because l know together we can make It. To do this I need to raise about £80. We cannot just sit and watch our surroundings. We need to do something positive.