A study published on PLOS Medicine shows that migrants experience high rates of depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorders, and that it’s necessary to provide immediate and continuous psychological support.
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A poem entitled “No title”, because when one suffers from depression there seem to be no words to describe it. The world around seems to dissolve and words are deprived of their meaning and unfit to describe one’s feelings. This is the theme at the heart of the poem by Alum Comfort Anne, a young and talented Ugandian poet who has been inspired by her personal struggle with depression. She takes us in the middle of a stormy night, torn by the desire both to live and to die, until the break of dawn. The final verses convey not only the despair behind a suicide attempt but also the invincible faith in human solidarity and mutual support, because “we are all just human, anyway”.
Leggi di piùAn analysis of the educational offer for students with visual impairments across Sub-Saharan Africa created as a background document for the 2020 Global Monitoring Report.
Leggi di piùThe 2020 Global Education Monitoring Report focuses on inclusion in education, paying particular attention to all the young people who are excluded from education basing on their background or disability.
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Approximately one billion people in the world live with some form of disability and around 80% is located in developing countries. 90% of children with disabilities do not receive an education or attend school. To tackle this problem, inABLE has structured a specific program for young students with visual disabilities called “Computers-Labs-for-the-Blind”. We interviewed Irene Mbari-Kirika, founder and executive director of the no profit organisation to address the issue of digital accessibility in view of the Inclusive Africa Conference 2020.
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Akimana Divine is a Rwandan poet, mental healthcare advocate and human rights activist. Her works have been published on numerous magazines and anthologies. The poem “Left without” allow us into that imaginery cave that is depression: a dark place where one is left without anything but his/her ghosts and fears. Divine has had her own hardships in life, first as a young girl being bullied for her weight and then as a single mother raising her boy alone. These painful experiences led her to find comfort in poetry and to write her own poems as a way of struggling against depression.
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Carolyne M. Acen, aka Afroetry, is a Ugandan Spoken word poet, writer and counselor. She has dedicated her life to poetry, which for her has become a form of activism to raise consciousness about delicate and complex issues: among these the condition of women, the search for freedom and all the prejudices coming from a patriarchal and macho mentality, not only African one. In this text, “My mother’s depression” she explores the theme of psychological distress linked to the family situation and, in fact, to a form of life oppressed by social constraining.
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In his poem “I am a refugee in my mind”, Alex Kitaka describes the sense of estrangement from the world and even oneself brought by mental distress. Bad thoughts represented by house flies buzz in our head and keep saying that there is no place for us, anywhere. But Alex reminds us that there is always a chance for us to bloom like roses and to heal through sharing: “I believe that writing creates a safer place to let out and let go of feelings that endanger someone’s mental health. Like always, writing is therapy!”
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Baya Osborn is a Kenyan born poet and writer and use the pen name Bayable Word. He is just 18 years old. “My life journey has been poetic” he told us. We also asked how come he has written poems on mental health: “Mental illness is something that is really affecting any people. Mostly people of the young age, and it is we writers that are supposed to wake and encourage those people going through tough times through our writings that we care about them, we will speak for them and their lives will change”.
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When it comes to migration, nothing is certain: no one knows when he/she will arrive or how long he/she will stay. The art of Nobukho Nqaba tells us stories, both visionary and real, about what is transient, destined to end. Nobukho was born in Butterworth, a small rural city in South Africa’s Eastern Cape. When she was six, she had to migrate within South Africa due to family issues. In this interview, she tells us about her performances that convey through her own body and presence – and often through the famous “Ghana must go home” – a sense of identiy, loneliness and otherness.
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