Podcast with Daphine Arinda
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The podcasts are based around ...
“At this time in our history/global crisis, i would like to explore 3 questions:
What inspired you?
What are you doing now?
What would you do/support/invest in if you were a philanthropist now?
Arinda's notes and poems
One thing I would campaign for meaningfully is the celebration of scrap and bottle collectors in my Country Uganda. These people are devoted cleaners of mother earth, ridding her of plastics and metals that are increasingly eating up my soils and clogging my waters. They are underpaid and yet the benefit of the work they do is immense. They move around with sacks and huge bags picking up after careless busy bodies. Without contracts they feed the supply chain of recycling plants.
The people who Collect bottles and metal scrap are usually street children. These children have no parental love and care, they are homeless and this is one way to make a little money to buy some food.
If I was able to, I would campaign for the recognition of their labour as work that deserves to be paid generously. I am campaigning for them to be recognized as protectors of mother earth, for them to be awarded honour and accolades, to be consulted and considered in the development of policies and laws. They need to be visible in the line of advocacy towards climate justice.
The second thing I am really passionate about is poetry and specifically, I am talking about poetry as the language of nature. We should armour ourselves with a language that speaks to humanity about their habitant earth; a habitant which sustains them. We have forgotten how dependant we are on mother earth and poetry can create this connection. Engaging in poetry as an art of writing causes us to seek out nature often for ambiance. A quiet green spot can inspire free thought and creativity. Because many of us are not writing poetry, we miss out on this desire for serenity so we don’t know the cost of cutting down trees, destroying the hash of the river.We have not hunger for quiet or the colour green because crafts that get us into such spaces are forgotten or not equated the necessary centrality in our education, politics and cultural expression.
Listening to or reading poetry is another way we can reconnect with nature and be encouraged in our drive for fair use of the Earth’s givings like minerals, oceans, forests and islands. I use poetry to inspire environmental justice.
Here is a poem about Women’s. relationship with land, how their right to mother earth is disenfranchised by patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism. Women are inheritors of the land yet the laws in most countries refuse them land ownership and equal rights to access land. The poem is titled Goddess of the Earth. In this verse I call forth African deities of the Earth Queen Ati of Djibouti , Atete of Ethiopia, Wagar of Somalia, Mumbi of kenya, Kitaka of Uganda and Abuk of Sudan.
GODDESS OF THE EARTH
The equal rights promised by our constitutions
Are only ‘a sorry’ from a faulted intuition
You’d think that it is only natural
To remember that men and women are equal
They all breath using lungs
They have limbs to walk
And mouths to talk
And even if they did not walk or talk;
Because they breath- that is enough.
We use the law and policies
Like borrowed candles
That burn only for a while
But cannot be used completely
We call earth mother
But look what we’ve done here-
Pollution in the air and water.
We love our mothers
Yet treat women as weaklings
Things to be despised and deprived
Queen Ati of Djibouti
Atete of Ethiopia
Wagar of Somalia
Mumbi of kenya
Kitaka of Uganda
Abuk of Sudan
The deities of land are women
Yet women are the most dispossessed of land!
Shall we comply with a pile of lies
Laid out in words
On sheets of paper
Ratified and passed by men
Yet the Goddesses tell us
That women are the inheritors
of earth
And that is not selfish
Because women love their children
And men are women’s children.
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