My art project reflects a few of the essential features my interviewee Jama Mohamed shared with me during our interview on May 24, 2018. In our interview, we spoke about his commitment to working at United Women East Africa (UWEAST) center and helping underserved children in his community. Some of the work Jama does at UWEAST evolves on helping youth with mental health issues such as anxiety, depression, and developed trauma. What he spoke about mental health is an issue many people experience on a day-to-day basis. However, through his time working at UWEAST, Jama connects and helps the children with any service he can apply. Jama is interested in his field of study, he earned his undergraduate degree at San Diego State University in psychology and plans on pursuing his Master’s of Science Degree in Counseling, with a Concentration Licensed Professional Clinical Counseling (LPCC) at SDSU. In the interview, he mentioned the long-term goal is to help the underserved children at UWEAST be college bound. One of the many reasons they offer after-school tutoring, and through this program, many students have completed their route.
Secondly, I included the images of food because Jama shared the next move for UWEAST is to have their community garden. In the garden, they will have organic vegetables and fruits they can use to feed their families and children at UWEAST. He also spoke about convincing the San Diego Unified school district to provide culturally appropriate foods to their youth. Lastly, I included some of the images I took while volunteering with the women in the kitchen at UWEAST. Our class had the privilege of learning how to prepare a traditional dish and drink with the ingredients in the images.
In the middle, the project I used the Africa flag colors red, black, and green to represent the community UWEAST evolve around. They are a diverse group of people who are from different parts of East Africa such as Somalia, Uganda, Ethiopia, etc. Below that, I used a section of our interview transcript to represent his story through the images.
