GLOBAL CITIZEN YEAR ACADEMY
SOCIAL IMPACT PROPOSAL
BY
CHUKWUEMEKA VICTOR MOKWE
28TH NOVEMBER 2022
OVERVIEW:
Title: The People’s Resolution; Promoting Enlightenment and Health Resolution in my Community.
Overview:
My GCYA proposal is written as a nonfiction where I (Victor) am the centre character situated in my community and actively navigating through the problems behind the title ‘Promoting Enlightenment and Health Resolution in my Community’’ I wish to solve. My choice of a non-fiction format was to ensure the message and mission of my social impact proposal is driven home. The requirement to divide the proposal paper into different section headings: Overview, Fellow Information, etc, were maintained in chronology nonetheless; however, the proposal is best absorbed if read whole as a story.
Student Information:
The structure of the nonfiction is a depiction of me trying to respond to an essay prompt in which I estimated the budget of my student proposal to be 1500 dollars and the deep thought process that gave to the entirety of the story. In the story, I immersed myself in the backdrop of the problems I am trying to solve in my community starting with the backward traditional beliefs and practices rife in my community. I was careful to bring to life in the story the many mixed feelings, thoughts and inquisitions about the clash between primitive religious and traditional culture with the order of modern scientific reasoning and rationale I have.
Secondly, is the scenario of poor health and welfare which I captured with ‘’Because backwardness breeds madness’’, taking care to emanate the raw form or context of the plight of the people in my community
Applying the wealth of experience and morals from the GCYA, I concluded by successfully slating an agenda to curb these problems, encapsulated in the very title ‘‘Promoting Enlightenment and Health Resolution in my Community’’.
Problem/Need/Situation Description:
1.
‘‘Essay prompt: If you were awarded $1500 for a community service project to help your community, what issue would you address? Who would benefit and how? How would you measure the success of the activity? Note this should not be considered as an opportunity to request for funds.’’
Victor was at it again, under the beams of the kerosene lamp, ruminating on the Global Citizen Year Academy Social impact proposal prompt that has put his introvertedly thoughtful and environmentally conscious personality to the test over the past week spent grappling with what to write. Were his friends right by calling his personality a weak White-people material? Should a village-bred Igbo boy like him be pursuing opportunities for social impact and change-making like this?
Even then his only friends were made of paper and ink. Back in primary school, he learned to read and write long before the other children. Where his classmates saw notches of ink on incomprehensible pages, he saw light, streets, and people. Words and the mystery of their hidden science fascinated him and he saw in them a key with which he could unlock a boundless world, a haven from his current reality: those troubled days in which he felt like a stranger, if not a foreigner, in his home.
Did he not learn any lesson from the beatings his father gave him for repeatedly disobeying him, for choosing his passion for reading books and erudition over his father’s will to carry on the family’s fanatism with the African traditional culture and norms?
No, he was too inquisitive to have been destined to be ‘‘Black people material’’. He questioned almost every illogical, abnormal and harmful aspect of Igbo culture since childhood, from the dramatic storytelling under full moonlight to the annual new yam festival that celebrated an ordinary tuber crop; Why the female gender was second-place in Igbo hierarchy or entirely out of the picture in most events like property inheritance? Why spider webs at the corners of a house are interpreted as a sign of spiritual attack by one’s enemies rather than the natural habitat of spiders? Why bush baby, which logically is a nocturnal animal possessing natural adaptive characters, is interpreted as some doe-eyed female human-like evil spirit with long entangling breasts and a tail? Why barrenness is interpreted as the product of some evil spell or curse tracing the matrilineal lineage of the household? Why Atuere/Ukwu agba shoe are believed to be invoked mischiefs or deprecations by sadists; meanwhile, are diseases like elephantiasis and measles that can be prevented and treated? Why Igbo mythology crave ‘Arusi’, spirits and deities, or worse still, worship inanimate objects, attributing infinite godliness and glorious life to the lifeless? Why people were deemed the property of the gods, Osu, and completely forbidden from interactions and relationships whatsoever?
‘‘Is it just human nature to search for the source of the sophistication of the human species by reconciling it with an almighty ‘god factor’ and greater supernatural beings? Or is the origin and function of religion tailored to serve as the opium of the masses, somewhat, a check and balance on the pliable and unpredictable character of man?’’ He often wondered.
‘‘Does appealing to an immaterial world avoid certain important questions that deserve answers? It is no longer heresy that we are in fact physical beings, that our brains are the source of mental life: our emotions, decision-making, passions, pains, and everything else we perceive outside of ourselves. So, for the sake of conventional and conservative societal traditions and culture, must we continue to take the literature and proponents of Academia with a pinch of salt? Is it not the big picture to migrate from the Dark Ages to the Age of Reason and Enlightenment?
Biologists and psychologists would be quick to point as evidence that damage to the brain can have profound effects on who we are. Examples ranging from the historical case study of Phineas Gage whose character and disposition were completely transformed by his head injury, diseases like syphilis that disrupt the will of consciousness, Alzheimer’s that rob you of your rationality, to coffee and alcohol that inflame desires. Offshoots of the so-called almighty ‘Astonishing Hypothesis’.
Are these evidence that physical events that affect the brain can affect us or some theatrical science fiction attempting to animate the mundane nature of science? Our joys, sorrows, beliefs, memories, ambitions, love, romance, sense of personal identity and free will, in fact, no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules?
On second thoughts, could this be the secret of miracles, the unaccountable? A manipulation of undiscovered and convoluted dimensions in sciences by greater powers? Are we faithful followers and believers in religion because we have failed to traverse 'out-of-bounds?’’
Intended Outcomes/Impact of Activities
Nevertheless, immersed in this conflict between logic and religion, between the rational principles behind his traditional upbringing and evolutionary message of the outside modern world of the 21st century, there was so much out of place and backward to have allowed enough room for his young mind to develop into the forward-thinking mindset and his passion into an agenda to right the false and faulty cultural beliefs, paradigm and religious doctrines in his community. He has written a short story titled ‘‘Anomaly’’:
(https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NU446MBcoImAqNVZ4G3bov2y1EhDClFm/view?usp=sharing) to address the debilitating and backward nature of the African traditional beliefs in his community, and looks forward to mobilizing massive enlightenment programs to educate his community right and creating awareness of the demotional and regressive impact of these practices.
‘‘What a life journey…. ’’ he said to himself. ‘‘It is a wonder how backwardness can breed madness.’’
And then it hit him: Eureka!
‘’Because backwardness breeds madness’’; the perfect theme for his GCYA social impact proposal he thought. After much research, scribbling down outlines and running through multiple drafts, he was able to write:
**
2.
BECAUSE BACKWARDNESS BREEDS MADNESS
If I invited you to join my daily commute down the roads in Aba North area or took you on a stroll just past my residential street within the local community, we might walk into the cluster of mothers/widows who regularly seat by Faulks road, under the shade of umbrellas, cradling and breastfeeding their skinny babies while begging for public support.
We might equally walk into a mob of protesting youths marching towards the Aba North Local Government Headquarters and shaking the earth with each march and clamour for a premium educational system and a definite stop to the agelong strike actions by public universities in Nigeria over the poorly funded Nigerian educational sector:
Resume Schools! End the University strikes!
Within a kilometre drive in commute, you would be shocked to have counted a good number of fatal health cases of wound infection, hernia, tumours, and metastasized cancers. The victims of these public health crises would be lying by the roadside or loitering in the traffic, begging for aid; before long, you might equally sight cases of malnourishment and Kwashiorkor in children, orphans, and vagrants whose feet and bodies would be heavy from a long day of toil, of begging for at least a day's meal.
Those hawking biscuits, sweets, and soft drinks would usually dash out of the traffic when the raging violent scene from irritated drivers and bus conductors whose bottled-up frustrations from the poor standard of living overflow and turn accusatory glares and insults at each other into fistful confrontation and brutal martial combat with broken bottles and the likes.
You might get used to driving past the good number of mentally ill people who must have dissociated from the burdens of maintaining a life that was too heavy for them to carry. Don’t mistake the dread looks of hopelessness on their overly crumpled faces and their condition as some punishment for their incompetence at working hard to overcome the challenges of life, or pass the same judgement when we might witness the common scenario where apprehended thieves are publicly mutilated and burnt on the street, whatever the case may be. They are humans, we all are, nonetheless. When we come to the end of the commute/stroll, please do not be too quick to call them beggars, mad, mentally deranged, criminals, ghetto people, street children, or as much as call my community a mess, because I couldn’t be prouder to be of them, by them, and for them. If you took a closer look, you would notice that we are farmers, tailors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, doctors, nurses, carpenters, electricians, traders, or husbands/fathers, wives/mothers, families, promising social units, but also victims of a backward public welfare and health system.
Intended Outcomes/Impact of Activities
My closest encounter with madness was on the multiple occasions my father beat me to a stupor over my love for books. The experience may not completely capture the definition of madness, but the immense pain I endured over something that should be normal redefined my perspective of madness. Deep down, I knew my father’s intentions for me were for good. He was a victim of the backward village fetishes that forced irrational impulses and aggressive actions on him, his mentality clouded and sight blinded to the fact that his son, my wounded twelve-year-old self he desperately tried to shape into a property of the gods, yearned for resolution.
In the same light, it matters that the widows by the roadside can easily displace touch with reality, suffering from the great depression; that the protesters, greatly aggrieved by the high cost of living, marched the streets protesting. it equally matters that the homeless children in the traffic and so-called criminals are potentially active workforce for the community whose inborn talents and skills are being lost to the ugly fate of street life and unemployment, that the mentally ill people must have suffered from unimaginable hardship/want and lost consciousness of sense and self. It matters more that they too need resolution.
Work Plan/Specific Activities & Budget
Therefore, BECAUSE BACKWARDNESS BREEDS MADNESS, if I were endorsed with $1500 for a community service project, I would organize ‘‘The People’s Resolution’’, a project to promote better general health and living conditions in my community, I will work in collaboration with the Medical Research and Humanitarian Society (MEDRHUS)
(see: https://days-in-thelife.blogspot.com/2022/10/me-at-medical-outreach-at-umuabi-udi.html) in my university, employing and deploying the voluntary expertise of her experienced activist, humanists, doctors, fellow visionary members and social impact volunteers from my community. Together, we will launch a massive public enlightenment program to reorient harmful indigenous traditions and unhealthy lifestyles, utilizing various means of publication: social media platforms, written and published articles (see my work: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CAuUuSP2iaD4dCy18bJUWzWmgi4lILx-/view?usp=sharing), books or magazines, open tutorial sessions on the streets, in schools or churches. To promote interest in education, scholarship incentives will be awarded to high-performing students in the tertiary, secondary, and primary levels who meet the necessary criteria of assessment including best performance in national exams like JAMB and WASSCE. Also, funds will be dedicated to supporting the education of promising less-privileged students, enrolling and accommodating homeless children in foster/motherless baby home care. Community medical outreaches and disbursement of basic health kits, infant immunization, free drugs, and clinical health tests. This will be achieved by the dual collaboration of associations on my university campus I consider my agency like the Medical Research and Humanitarian Society (MEDRHUS) and Youth Health Action Network (YOHAN) (https://days-in-thelife.blogspot.com/2022/09/community-medical-outreach.html). My affiliations with professional medical bodies and social work organizations will enable me to mobilize voluntary services committed to empowering youths in my community through skill acquisition sessions, igniting passion, dreams, and will, and starting up livelihoods for the working class.
Evaluation
At this juncture, only the people would be able to legitimately measure the success of our community service. Only the many lives improved and empowered would attest to how valuable, life-changing, and impactful our activity and sacrifices have been. Better still, we would publicize their success stories to reflect the success of our project and attract domestic and international generous donations to sustain its operation.
How it is going:
