The workshops are presented in French. Simultaneous interpretation will also be offered in Kirundi and Kinyarwanda. Kirundi and Kinyarwanda are spoken by the Burundian and Rwandan communities to whom these workshops are mainly intended.
Connect Burundi, in partnership with the Mouvement ontarien des femmes immigrantes francophones (MOFIF), is offering a workshop on diet and mental health, this Thursday, May 6.
Oasis Center des femmes, for its part, will launch a discussion on the issues affecting the Rwandan and Burundian communities as well as on stress management, with three mental health professionals, on May 14.
Carline Zamar, director of MOFIF, says that her team wanted to reach out to the most vulnerable people by doing a series of workshops to demystify Alzheimer’s disease and equip caregivers.
Following one of these workshops, Connect Burundi joined forces with MOFIF to offer food workshops to members of the Burundian community.
Carline Zamar has been the Managing Director of MOFIF since 2019.
For Jacqueline Ndayizigamiye, vice-president of the Connect Burundi cultural center, it is important to offer this interpretation service in Kirundi so that members of the Burundian community feel comfortable talking and also to encourage newcomers to participate. According to her, this will help the Burundian community to take charge of their mental health.
When it comes to understanding very technical terms for which they lack reference in French, participants can thus obtain clarifications in the language they master, she says.
We discovered that there are people who have challenges in French or in English. We had conducted a needs survey. We really want to help them.
Likewise, the general manager of the Oasis center, affirms that women should feel at ease when they express the challenges in mental or physical health which they face. She also believes that when it comes to physical or mental health, being able to express yourself in your mother tongue is ideal. For the moment, we will be offering the workshops in Kirundi and Kinyarwanda and we are also considering offering some in other languages., she says.
She adds that promotional posters for the workshops are also in Kirundi and Kinyarwanda to attract customers from the Burundian and Rwandan communities.
However, unlike the MOFIF workshops, which are open to all, those at Oasis Center for women target women only, explains Dada Gasirabo, director general of the center.
