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By:
JAMES GACHAU | |||||||||
| Posted:
Nov,01-2018 19:27:28
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WORCESTER, Mass--The Kenyan community in Worcester vowed to reinforce efforts to fight the stigma surrounding mental health in a bid to curb the rising toll of suicide among Kenyans living in the Greater Boston area. This comes as more concerned members of the community prepare to hold a similar discussion in Lowell this Sunday evening at the CCF church on 105 Princeton Boulevard.
Meeting at the Boys and Girls Club of Worcester on Sunday, October 7, 2018, members of the community spoke freely and openly about their experiences with depression and suicide. The gathering started out as a fund-raiser for Uhai for Health, a platform whose "aim is to improve the lives of the marginalized African population both in the US. and in Kenya through health education and promotion, research, screening and referral."
Moderating the event, Christopher Kibathi spoke eloquently about the need for diaspora Kenyans to start listening to the youth, who are the most affected by suicide. He urged that it is time for the community to "get with the program!"
"We are losing an entire generation!" Kibathi said. "We as parents have been doing all the talking. We haven't been listening to our children. We haven't been paying attention."
Although the event was a fundraiser for Uhai, Kibathi opened the meeting up for anyone who wanted to share their experiences with the issue of mental health.
"I still want your money," he added, "but this is an open mike. We are all welcome to talk about what we can do to save the community. We are going to piggy-back on Uhai, which will propel us to the next level. We do not need to wait for the next episode of suicide before we start doing something."
The first person to speak (name withheld for confidentiality) was a woman who said that as a single parent, she had had it really rough dealing with her daughter's depression. Single parents need help from married folks, she added, because it takes a village to raise a child.
According to the mass.gov website, "Bridgewater State Hospital (BSH) is a medium security facility housing male patients in several categories: civil commitments without criminal sentences, and on occasion, pre-trial detainees sent for competency and criminal responsibility evaluations by the court." "I have worked at Bridgewater State Hospital, which is essentially a prison," she explained. "There, I have met Njau, Kamau, and Njoroge, all of them the sons of Kenyan single mothers. Our community has failed to raise our sons. We need to rise up and raise our sons." Wikipedia explains that BSH "is a state facility housing the criminaly insane and those whose sanity is being evaluated for the criminal justice system." The Kenyan lady gave the moving story of her daughter who got depression at the age of twelve. When she cried for help from her church pastors, they told her that her daughter was possessed. When she talked to other mothers, especially those old enough to be her own mother, they told her to take her daughter back to the place where she got married. She lamented that the Kenyan community looks at those among them suffering from depression as a curse that needed to be banished from society. The concerned mother added that her daughter stayed in hospital for four months, and it was only after her friends came and prayed together did she get discharged, proving that, indeed, "mental health is a communal issue," she said. Diving deeper into the problem, another Kenyan parent shared on open mike that only the previous Tuesday, she had been in court and sitting at the front of the courtroom were twelve Kenyan kids, all of them there because they were high. She revealed that young Kenyans go to a rooming house, which serves as a domicile for men, to experiment with drugs and alcohol. The rooming house has become notorious, and is known as Block or, Plot 10. Plot 10 is the name of a once-famous Kenyan TV show. A mother who said she takes care of her son with a mental health issue, spoke tenderly about how young Kenyan men in Worcester do not have positive male role models to look up to. She explained how she had always thought her husband did not feel any pain about the state of their son, until he came from Kenya (where he lives and works) to visit his son at Bridgewater. "When my son saw his father," she said in her calm gentle voice, "he said that he wanted to visit with only him, and not me or his sister. He sat down with him, just the two of them, holding hands, for two hours." She added that that it was only after this incident that she understood how much anguish men feel to see their children suffer from mental illness: "My husband told me that it hurts him more than I will ever understand." In response, one man stood up to say that he and a group of other men have decided to come together to "bring the men back to our homes." "Yesterday," he explained, "we launched the Kenyan Men of Worcester, an association that aims to bring back the father figure to our community. We are saying that drinking is not everything. We need to stop these nyama chomas (a Kenyan delicacy consisting mainly of fire-roasted goat meat) we have all the time." "There are far too many young Kenyan men in jail in Worcester, and we can mitigate this by becoming positive role models for them."
To reiterate the communal nature of mental health, another man said that while he was a nursing student doing ward rounds, one of the instructors gave another student a patient to work with. The patient turned out to be Kenyan. Everyone in the class started talking about her, making the Kenyan student feel so bad. "Why can't I take care of one of our own?" he asked. "Why are we able to take care of 20 to 30 mentally ill patients but not our own? We really need to give ourselves and our services to our community." Harrison Maina of Ajabu Africa Media spoke at length about the ubiquity of mental illness: "We have all encountered mental illness in one form or another all our lives. I had two relatives die of suicide when I was very young, but nobody talked about the cause of deaths, although we later came to find out it was suicide. "We need to stop stigmatizing suicide. We need to talk mental illness it as a community. He added that recently, Ajabu Media reporters had come across about 35 homeless Kenyans in the city of Lowell, all of them a result of mental illness and domestic violence issues. "According to reliable reports we have gathered, this year alone, we have lost 5 Kenyans to suicide in Massachusetts alone." Dr. Mercy Kamau opined that perhaps Kenyan boys in the US are missing something by not going through circumcision as a rite of initiation into adulthood as is customarily done in Kenya. Kibathi and Michael Chege, a business entrepreneur in the area responded to this by agreeing that it is important to teach our children about our cultures. As an example, Kibathi pointed out that he had refrained from the American practice of infant circumcision for his son, and waited until the boy was eleven, when he started talking to him about the ritual and its importance. When he turned 13, he got circumcised and his dad and his friends congratulated him on this crucial milestone. Thus, the central theme that emerged from the fundraiser, which eventually managed to garner slightly more than the stated goal of $2,000, was that mental illness can be mitigated and alleviated by communalism, by the members of the community coming together as Kenyans with common roots in the Diaspora. The much needed community debates continues this Sunday when all concerned Kenyans are invited to attend from 3pmto 6pm at the CCF church on 105 Princeton Boulevard. | |||||||||
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Source:
AJABU AFRICAN NEWS
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