The Stars of Sandema

The Stars of Sandema

During our stay here of approximately 4 weeks, we have seen many stars. By that we are inferring to both the giant hot balls of gases you see on the ceiling of the night sky and the great people that make up this city. Sandema is a small village that inhabits many good people and souls who labour day and night to earn their daily bread.

Being avid travellers, we have learnt that a great city is not made up of the quality of tourist attractions but rather the people that live in it. The amount of joy and love the people show to one another is ethereal to look at. As a team our core aim is to integrate and raise awareness for the disabled people in the district to ensure they are acknowledged as important citizens.

We hope to achieve these goals through the inclusion of children living with disabilities into sporting activities in schools, by raising the awareness level of people as to how to care for disabled people through sensitisations programmes and by ICT workshops. All in all the prospect of the project is in goods hands and we are all in awe about kick starting the project and despite the fact it is our fourth week in this community, everyday feels like our first.

Through some of the people that we have met here, we have been inspired to make more of an effort to help others.  One of these people is Charles, a blind man who makes a living by weaving. We met him through a meeting we had with the local DPOs and couldn’t take my eyes off at what he was doing.

Even for a person with full vision, weaving is not easy to learn and takes time to master. Now take a blind man, it becomes more of a challenge to learn the skill yet this man does it wherever he is so that he can make a living for his family. This has taught us that no matter what your limitations are you can do anything. With practice; you can overcome any limitation and do the seemingly impossible!

Another person who we have met with is Yaw. He invited Team LIFE to view his kindergarten that he runs, for young children, in a rural village where access to education for the local youngsters was non-existent! What struck us even more is his answer when one of us asked him why does he do what he does. His response was ‘I want these young children to develop a strong foundation in reading as I believe in order to progress to higher education one must be proficient in understanding what they are reading and through my kindergarten I hope to see these young bucks become masters of reading’.

 Despite having a disability, Yaws’ actions are having and will continue to have big impact on his community. Through this, we see that we all should have some sort of responsibility of further bettering our community and no matter your limitations, every one can make a positive impact, be it small or big.

Through meeting these people we have seen that no matter how mountainous a challenge may seem if you want to do it then you can, if you put your mind to it and persevere. In the future we hope to capture many more valuable accounts of people over the upcoming weeks and put them on paper. One way we wish to achieve this is by starting a ‘Humans of Sandema’ project whereby a picture of a person is taken and we note down a life experience of there’s from which people can take inspiration. Without further ado, we believe that the title at first may have been deceiving so it only makes sense that this blog ends with a picture of the stars that was captured on a night not too long ago from today.