By Joel Tommy Conteh
26 January, 2021 (232News)
FREETOWN – Moeba is a lone community situated at the hill-side of the Eastern part of Freetown. It has a population of over 16,000 and with youths making up 70% of that amount. Because of its geographic representation, people have access to water and a relative amount of electricity with little or no amount of road facilities.
Growing up in this community would be lifetime challenge for anyone. Because Moeba community is challenged with many social factors affecting the youths and young generation. Factors ranging from too much urge for social occasions, gangsterism, gang banging, early pregnancy, early marriage and many other social issues that are hazardous to its youths.
However, because of these social factors serving as limitations to the highest degree, this has led most of the young minds in the community to diverge their life goals and be carried away by these things. In that, people begin to develop a negative mindset about youths of Moeba especially when it comes to their representation in education or educational related matters. In the streamline of their mentality, they posit a theory that “Moeba Community is not a place where young people will be represented in tertiary institutions especially the female gender, who they believe will only stop at secondary school and get pregnant to drop out from school”. This baseless perception was backed, by a defense connected to fetish or supernatural forces.
Further, Thomas Edison posited that “our greatest weakness is giving up, the certain way to success is to try once more”. This negative instilled thinking have been passed on from generation to generations, shying away most of the youths in the community because they believe they have no place in pursuing tertiary education. Such a negative thinking was becoming almost a tradition. You will see youths active in social related matters but give little or no attention to what has to do with formal education. Just because they believe it’s a norm that they won’t thrive in pursuing formal education, so they turn to some other informal or skill learning.
In admixture, in these fixed mindset scenario, there were a little set of people who forced their ways in order to acquire tertiary education. Though little in number, but these people were very powerful and admirable because they are a total representation of the exception to the instinct the people of the community have towards youths acquiring tertiary education.
Finally, in few years back, the revolution of youths making it to tertiary institutions began. The mindset of youths not having a place in tertiary education was broken, youths both male and female were making good results to universities and colleges. The number keeps swelling everyday. Most of these students have graduated and have started working. These set of people who bring the change are a strong motivation to the younger minds in the community. Because of the influx of students coming from this part of the country which was hardly seen or heard, these students were prone to establish a student body in representation of the community. This focus body has been initiating developmental projects like free teaching service to schools, community hygiene sensitization and more so serving as an inspiration to their younger ones. It’s a dawn of a new era to see people making a change to a long negative instilled traditional thinking. And doing so not only by being seen as students, but also recognize for the development they bring to their community through what they’ve acquired from their various institutions.
Conclusively, such an occurrence as this has taught us one great lesson, that we are not to be controlled by the opinions of people. The thinking of people must not tie us down from achieving our goals. It’s always important to give your life just to make a simple difference others can’t make. Today change has come to Moeba Community in the aspect of student representation. And such a change shall forever live on.
