Damiete Braide
Christmas is a period of giving and showing love to people in the society as often displayed by Christians. The Rewrite Nigeria Development Initiative (TRNDI), a non-governmental organisation, in collaboration with some companies, is set to put smiles on the faces of the less-privileged children in Whitesands community, Ikorodu, Lagos State.
For greater impact, it revealed that through the maiden edition, it would spend 12 days of Christmas with the prospective beneficiaries.
Its founder, Mrs Rose Egbeleye, said the main objective was to take care of children and their parents. She added that one could not touch children’s lives without having a ripple effect on their parents:
“That is why we have to empower these parents so that they can learn and have a better knowledge of how life should be. TRNDI shares a lot of things in common with the companies that are partnering with us. No one really cares about the poor.
“The project is tagged, 12 Days of Christmas. It is about the people living at Whitesands Community in Ikorodu. People visit other less-privileged homes, and the norm is that such people are given gifts and nothing ever changes. But we want to do something different and that is why we initiated 12 Days of Christmas.
“The idea is to spend the first 12 days of December every year with the less privileged in the society. We will spend 11 days with them and on the 12th day, there will be a charity concert. We are leveraging on Christmas because it is a time of giving.
“Therefore, we appeal to Nigerians, corporate bodies and the entertainers to support us in this project. When entertainers and artistes go to these places, people listen to their songs because arts and entertainment are powerful tools to give hope to the hopeless.
“The people believe in these artistes and look up to them as mentors.
We must come together as a people every year to give back to the society. This is the platform to really impact on these communities.”
Captain Brown of Karmond Group added that his company was poised to change the lives of people living in slums by providing and building decent houses for them in the same community: “Karmond at the moment can provide good accommodation for people at a very affordable cost.
We can build houses in 48 hours we will continue to support this initiative because it is a laudable one.”
The CEO, Global Concepts, Wale Babajide, said his team came up with the idea of bringing total transformation through collaboration with other people targeted at taking people out from the slum, which would be executed one community at a time. He noted that they were working with the less-privileged from the Whitesands community to make them live a better life:
“It is emotional when you see how these people live. We have visited the community and we couldn’t hold back our tears and that is why we have decided to do something great for this community.
“We want to be the voice of these people and that is why this company is partnering with the NGO to make life better for these people.
Twelve days of Christmas is a fund-raising concert to raise money to make a difference in the lives of these people.”
Dr Essence Royal said the NGO has come up with an idea of upgrading these slum communities with a renewal strategy that consists of physical, social, environmental and organisational improvements to disadvantaged communities and these can only be done if we partner together:
“We will also improve the living standard of the people. We feel for people whenever we see the things that they are going through and we are in a position to help them. If all these people can be helped, we will all have a better society to live in.”