"Wali-Nkt'okelezea"
Tofauti on
the move welcomed our friendly southern African neighbors from Botswana to the
movement in June this year for an overwhelming experience. Seeing that though
we Africans, their culture shock was arguably witnessed more than even the
Europeans. This shows that we as Africa still have a wide diverse range of
cultures to learn from and fuse with and that every country is quite unique and
special in themselves.
The batman
and robin of the tswana were Joy Mogami and Brian Moabi 'respectively'. Their
input to team tofauti was greatly seen as they reopened the National Spinal Cord
Injury Hospital rehabilitation project where they dealt with the paraplegic.
They fused in quite well seeing as they major in psychology.
Here’s a
snippet of Brian's experience,
“I found out
about Tofauti on the move organization through the Strathmore University. The
internship was organized by AIESEC Kenya Strathmore University Local Chapter.
We began work on the 20th June at the Vijito School. Since we had initially
shown interest in doing Psychology/Counseling related work, we worked at the
school while we searched for our preferred choice of work. We taught at the
school for only a week after which we left to start work at the National Spinal
Injury Hospital in Kilimani. Work there was more challenging than we had
anticipated but nonetheless enlightening. We did work at the hospital for the
last three weeks of our stay in Nairobi. Although this was a short time in
comparison to the 6 weeks that we anticipated we would do, it is however still
appreciated by the patients who we worked with. The hospital has also been grateful for the work we did. As counseling requires a lot of time to fully
build what is known as rapport with a client we decided to work with a few of
the patients as this would allow us more time with them. This worked to our
advantage since we did manage to build stronger relationships with the clients
who we worked with.
Tofauti on
the move, as a non -organization is doing a great job in sensitizing and
effecting change in the communities around Nairobi. The planning and successful
execution of the International Psychosocial Resettlement Symposium is a
testimony to this fact. The symposium remains the highlight of my internship
with the organization. I learned a lot from the conference and remain humbled
by the experience. The diversity of the delegation at the conference also
provided a broader scope of the topics and the angles with which they were
covered. A strong tool that Tofauti has, is the diversity of the interns who it
accommodates. This provides not only different opinions but also different
solutions and a broader outreach to the world. As a result, Tofauti has a
worldwide network of former interns who I believe carry the Tofauti lessons
with them throughout..."
