Author: shaheen

Hi everyone!

I’m pretty sure I mentioned that I’m going to Uganda in January to work with a literacy project in rural Uganda with Go Global ISL – Daniel did this before me! I found out today that I’m going to Kitengesa, the first community library project begun in Uganda! I’m super excited to go and I really do believe that this is an amazing project; community libraries can be more than just our version of a library; they’re community centres, places of learning, and an amazing way to promote literacy and education! It opens up so many opportunities for people to learn how to read and enjoy reading, which opens so many doors and is so important to education, and I think that since last week we all agreed that education was really important in post-conflict settings, I thought I’d share what this project is sort of about!

Kitengesa Community Library was featured on BBC News; it’s a little off I’m sure but you guys can get the jist of it!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-11499311

http://www.kitengesalibrary.org/ Here’s also the library’s website so you can see what it’s all about!

Enjoy everyone! =)

-Shaheen

hi guys!

this article is from december 2009 but i thought it was really relevant to our discussion. it’s about former child soldiers of the LTTE and how the government is providing an education and vocational training for them to basically help them reintegrate into society and contribute. courses are taught in Tamil rather than Sinhala, so these children are getting an awesome opportunity at an education that they might not have had before. this sounded like a great idea to me, but there are a ton of criticisms that come along with it. the most prominent one was that this was just a propaganda move on the part of the sri lankan government;

“The government wants to showcase this to the international community and to the media. It wants to create an impression that other camps are run on the same lines. Sri Lanka’s government is keeping over 10,000 suspected LTTE members in various camps. International organisations are not given any access to these camps…”

here’s the link to the article if you want to read it! i thought it was really interesting.

-shaheen

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8400366.stm

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-11558746

Hey everyone,

Looks like the 4 countries affected by the LRA have decided to take some action…a joint brigade between Uganda, Sudan, Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo, backed by the African Union, is going to “go after” the LRA rebels. It is believed that this will be a mobile brigade that can be used by the AU in “times of trouble,” such as going after the LRA, and other groups like al-Qaeda in Mali and Mauritania.

Seems like a legitimate possible solution to me, but its crazy that it’s taken 20+ years to get to this point! Maybe now that all of these countries have united to fight against the LRA, something can finally be done about it, but our discussions have shown that things are a little less cut and dry than they may seem. What do you guys think?

-Shaheen

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-10996764

Here’s an article that relates to the problems with DDR that we talked about in the first class; it gives a case example in Uganda. There are more links at the bottom for more background information.