A visit to my village: How can I use Steemit to fight poverty in my community?

For emphasis' seek I'm going to start this article by repeating the question from the title: How can I use Steemit to fight poverty in my community?

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In 2011, I had a chat with a friend I had met on Facebook. The boy was only 14 years then and I was 18. He got interested more in our conversation when I revealed to him I was from Africa, Why?
According to him, he had never been in a poor community and he had never met a poor person in his entire 14 years of life. I was left bewildered by this, may be because I was living and breathing poverty, the statement could not just sink in. He got interested in the conversation because he wanted to hear more about poverty in Africa.

Well, I was not going to sell our continent out but was only going to narrate my experiences as an African child from an average home. The fact is that hiding your wound does not necessarily heal it, does it?
His family lived in Aylesbury Estate in South East London. Now I can understand why he might not have met any poor person.

"Do you have good drinking water?" he had asked. I took it upon myself to explain to him that good water was relative. I lived in an average home in an average town called Bimbilla -capital of a small district in Northern Ghana. My home was connected with the water provided by Ghana water company and even though a lot of visible clouds were formed in the water just minutes after fetching, it was still considered safe water.

Probably there are homes in Accra who would not even use the water we had in Bimbilla to bath. To them it is not safe water until it is irradiated and bottled. But to put it into perspective, I explained further, some communities which I have lived as a child where the women had to sack cattle just to get drinking water. They had to leave the water for hours after returning from the dam for the sand to settle. Other communities had to walk for hours to get to dams of that nature else they would have to dig and wait for water to spring.

I am writing this article because I visited my home town recently during the Christmas break (even still there). Just a couple of days back I followed a friend to a small village called Nakpayili. He was going to visit his uncle and I decided to follow him just to explore. What I experienced there evoked tears in me and I had to interview his uncle about his sources of income.

The home had 3 rooms if they are qualified to be called such and the household was about 7, the man, his wife and 5 children. He told me he was staying alone when I asked about how they managed to fit in the 3 rooms. At first I was shocked, I thought it was not fair he had a whole room to himself until I ventured into the room.

This was the set up of his room: I was shy to take the pictures myself so my friend took these picture with his Techno phone

what you are seeing is where someone lives, eats and sleep

The funny yet sad thing was that he was sharing the room with a hen which was warming its eggs at the time we took the pictures

The room also doubled as the overall closet and storage room for the household. You would wonder where he sleeps but that was not a cause of worry for him. He told us that what would a man be sleeping at night for and who would protect his family? He then showed us the mat he spreads at night to lay his head. This one room was enough, I didn't border checking the other rooms out because if the master bedroom was this way, how more the ordinary ones

But trust me, the poverty I saw was not in the above pictures but in the way he was thinking even in this era of extensive information. But why should I be shocked? After all, he had no television or radio and definitely is unlettered so how will he access information?
Families of this nature is more likely to transfer their poverty inclined mindset to their poor unsuspecting children who would also grow to be poor. How then do we grow as a community in this kind of cycles?

It got me thinking as to what I could do as an individual to reach out to people like this and let them see the opportunities they can give to their children by sending them to school. Now, the free basic education implemented by the government of Ghana could be of much use if only families of this nature were reached and sensitized.

So how can Steemit as a community help me to achieve this aims?

As a child I always wanted more. Even as poor as my community was I believed I was going to be more than that and in turn do something about it. I was not enrolled in school but I use to find myself there after farm. Anytime we came from the farm I would ran out without bathing with the sole aim of meeting school in session. Even though I was not a registered student, all the teachers liked me because of this. It was this zeal that got me into formal school and now I am on my way to graduating as a doctor later this year at the age of 24.

This article is however, is not about me but about the children probably with potentials much more greater than mine who are left to the dust. It is about the children who could as well be the next block-chain CEOs, doctors, managers etc. who are left without any chance of making it in life. It is about the very poor who does not have access to the explosive information of this era.

I am only 28 days old on this platform but I have seen the kind of projects Steemians are undertaking to help their communities and this only leaves me wondering, how much can a minnow like me do?
When am I going to be able to organise other Steemians to take the bull by the horns and do what needs to be done in no matter how small for the greater good?

My life has never been about me, I wish for the world where everyone had at least some kind of opportunity to make it out of abject poverty. Let's get some work done.

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