Issue 247

Dear friends, I had been living in Canada for close to thirty years, and after feeling nostalgic for my mother country, I had decided to move back and try to live in my birth city Hargeysa. Now that I have returned and have been living in Hargeysa for a couple of years now, I must say oo what a glorious feeling it is to be back.

But friends, putting aside my love and my great feelings for Somaliland, I must say that I am very disappointed by my fellow brothers and sisters, who have taken an attitude of negativity and pessimism towards our country and its future. What I mean by this is that if I had a penny for every single negative comment or opinion portrayed by the citizens young or old, male or female of Somaliland, I would be richer than a man that goes by the name of Warren Buffet. So in response, I have decided to write or urge others to write a weekly article, if possible, on the great things that happen within our community, and by setting an example to others, I start of today with the extra-ordinary efforts made by a small community organization based in the Badacas district of Hargeysa, that call themselves the RED SEA Community Watch.

Friends, although I haven’t lived long in Hargeysa, I will still say that this is probably the first active community organization that I have ever witnessed in Hargeysa, and what is more pleasing is that, it is a program where the whole of the Badacas residents can be found taking part in. The RED SEA Community Watch or RSCW was formed in the beginning months of this year, and the scale of work it has done in the following months is unprecedented. Allow me to illustrate, many of you who have probably lived, lives in Badacas or passes it by, are probably aware of the huge amounts of garbage that was dumped there, especially near to children’s playgrounds and water runways and this is due to the fact that since there is no clear means of cheaply collecting and getting rid of house garbage, houses within the vicinity of the area have resorted to using the services of men who bring wheel barrows, offer to collect the garbage for a minimal amount of money and then turn a corner and dumping it in plain sight, and this will obviously lead to serious health problems. Well, after, the problem became too unbearable, a few good men decided to organize themselves and motivate the residents of the area to do something, and something they surely have done, they created the RSCW.

Right after this program was formed, a committee was elected and the main priority for this committee was to get rid of the heaps of garbage accumulated around the area and substitute the cause with a solution. This was still in the beginning stages, but now after several months has passed, all the garbage is gone, rounds are made by the City council civil servants who collect the garbage house-to-house, an absolute ban has been imposed on the dumping of garbage near residential houses, water runways and all-in-all near the vicinity of the district. Now as I am a great believer in the adage of help yourselves and GOD will help you, I have found out that that principle was proven, by the remarkable fact that on the exact spot where large piles of garbage used to be dumped, a field of yellow and white flowers has grown and now ideally looks like the Badacas a decade ago.

So, I wish to end my article with my humble salute to the residents of Badacas, and I also want to give some advice to my loving yet pessimistic Somaliland siblings that if we look more closely at our everyday lives, we will see many things good or bad, but since we get to live so little in this life, lets focus on the good things, shall we…

[kyc10101@hotmail.com]

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