Training in Yoga for Children
Support Sulcut, Meeky, Francess and Babardee to Spread the Light of Yoga
Purpose: We have created a scholarship fund to support Sulcut, Meeky, Babardee and Francess - four Sierra Leonean poets, singers, song-writers and yogis whose home has been on the streets over many years - in undertaking an intensive 18-month yoga training. They will pay their scholarships forward by teaching yoga to others, helping to heal the scars of trauma in street children and street youth, including gang members, narcotics addicts and sex workers in their communities.
Sierra Leone - Yoga to Build a Better World
The inspiration for taking yoga to the homeless, to gang members, street workers and drug addicts in Freetown came from Meeky, who had himself had spells of living on the street, sleeping rough in broken cars and under Congo Cross bridge.
Our yoga training gave Meeky a taste of wellbeing and inner peace, and he brought to us his dream of sharing what he had learned with other homeless street youth, to support their physical, mental and emotional health needs. We were immediately inspired by his vision. Besides offering yoga practices to street youth in Freetown, Meeky wanted to combine the yoga sessions with poetry and music, and follow the sessions with a warm nutritious meal plus monthly health check-ups.
Babardee SamuraThe project will impact more than 300 children and 100 vulnerable adults by the end of 2024. As Sulcut, Meeky, Babardee and Francess can testify, children in Sierra Leone face severe obstacles to their development. Most pressingly, children are at risk of child labour, violence and sexual abuse, child marriage and adolescent pregnancy. These risks, combined with systemic poverty, poor health conditions and lack of access to education, endanger all children in the country.
Michael Samuel Kamara a.k.a. Meeky Star
Always on the edge of survival, Sulcut, Meeky, Babardee and Francess' sources of income have dried up as the Covid-19 pandemic decimated opportunities for spoken word and music performances. Yet despite their own severely reduced circumstances, all three continue to volunteer to spread healing and joy through poetry, dance, music - and now yoga - to patients in a psychiatric ward, at a women’s prison, in schools, among orphans and other children in need.
Scholarships
We plan to continue to provide a stipend of £50 per month to our trainees for a period of 12 months, plus transport money to get to the street youth yoga classes. Our overall goal for the crowdfunding campaign is £2.700.
If you are feeling particularly generous and we manage to collect more money than needed for these three scholarships, we will distribute the additional funds to others taking part in the training who have financial needs. Thank you for helping us sow the seeds of yoga far and wide, to build a better world.
Sulaiman Bangura a.k.a. Sulcut
I Was Born in Poverty
by Sulaiman Bangura a.k.a. Sulcut
I remember when we used to sleep without food
No expectation of tomorrow
We only wished to see another day
We were poor and unsafe
Living on bush animals and plants
And curing our diseases with bush medicines
We lived and walked through the bush
Looking fearfully at the hills and trees
Walking miles every day just in search of the basics of life
We were like roses under a black rock
Locked in darkness
I remember the old building made of branches
With a roof of golden grasses
Some days we had to endure
The frenzied weather of the mountains
Mist floated through the building
And we felt the cold within our bones
Brothers and sisters lay in rows on the cold ground
Sharing an old faded blanket
We were living a mysterious rustic life without luxuries
The black soap we used was made by our grandma
We used sticks to clean our teeth
To be poor is not a crime, but poverty is an ugly relative
I Must Lose with You
by Meeky Star (Michael Samuel Kamara)
The Woman in Me
by Francess Kamara
In me there is a great woman
This woman makes a difference
Can make changes in my life
Day and night she gets stronger
This great woman in me
Makes me fight for what I want
believes in hustling hard
Makes me do astonishing things
Sometimes unbelievable
To everyone even me
Sometimes I wonder in slumber
What kind of woman I am
This woman can never change,
Can make perfect things occur
This woman can never give up
can never be lost or done with
The growth of her power in me
Makes me fight to victory
Ready to face the whole world
Show the power of the woman in me
Francess Kamara