The #SayftyChat 

If I ever told you the actual date that I fell in love with the Sayfty Chat
I’m here to tell you that I would be lying to you!
Wanna know wwwhhhyyyy?

Photo credit: swetavikram.com

Right….lemme get to it, then
It’s because I simply can’t remember
Perhaps, I’m just in deep love with the Sayfty Chat or as I commonly refer to it, #SayftyChat
Today, I’m here to tell you my story with the Sayfty Chat!

Photo credit: deskgram.org

I consider myself a social media junkie or call me a nomad, of sorts
All sorts of information, topics, countries, names of individuals and institutions…I interact with everything and anything while on social media
So, there was this one time I landed on a very interesting tweet….from the account of one of the greatest people I look up to and admire, for their tenacity and energy, Dr. Shruti Kapoor
It must have been a conversation-in-thread, on a particular subject…aaahhhhh, I recall, it was about violence against women and girls in India and how we collectively end it, using tools of social media.

Photo credit: sayfty.org

I was wowed by this insight that she shared and in between there, the #SayftyChat hash tag came about
I had never seen it before anywhere
So, I decided to click on it and see more about it
My oohhhh my, like they always say, “you never know what’s around the corner till you get to it”. This is exactly what happened to me, in this case.
All you could see were “these loose strands” of conversation talking about various subjects that matter the most to mankind everywhere, in the world.
That was before the latest upgrade made at Twitter where threading has become easier to do and follow…me being the first-timer, you can imagine the struggle I went through tracing the roots of the conversation.

Photo credit: twitter.com

I managed to make my way round it all with all the tweeting, retweeting, liking and quoting and then, I asked Dr. Shruti how I could become a proactive part of it.
She told me, “Join us every Monday. We shall always be having a discussion on the safety of women and girls. Feel free to become our guest on the Sayfty Chat, by letting us know on email which topic you’ll be covering that day….and any 5 questions you choose to focus on that day”.
Who does this kind of thing, for you, in this day and age?
I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw this!

Photo credit: worldpulse.com

I signed up right away, to be a guest, to which I was, in 2017, I believe….
My time on the Sayfty Chat, thus far, has been soooo worth it
I mean, I’m in Uganda….our time-zones are quite different and in the very beginning, it would require me to stay longer at my computer, interacting on the chat
Right now, it’s quite easier with the use of my mobile
Besides, I would be doing something else like taking a cold long shower or watching Arrow but no, I dedicated my Mondays to this, strictly!

Photo credit: pousadaazuldomar.net

The energies you get to feel when here, on the Sayfty Chat, suck into you and demand of you to raise your own bar higher, every day
Participants from all over the world, express themselves here and all their endeavors that they make happen and all we do, is to throw their word wider around and in the world….with the retweets, of course
It’s a free platform here…no money is charged to join in but once here, speak freely
We motivate each other to keep going in our different ranges of activism to make our world a better place to live in
Do you know that there are days when I feel so down and lack energy to keep going?
But the one thing that motivates me to pick it up is the chat and what it represents.
To the point that I can’t simply scroll past an injustice online and I let it go by
I always try something to do and if I’m not too occupied at that moment, I devise a plan to have a fruitful engagement with the parties involved to see to it that the wrong doing doesn’t happen again.
Currently, I’m working with a youth-led organisation, Faces Up Uganda
And at the beginning of this year, I thought deeply, about having something similar to the Sayfty Chat here….
And so, we rolled it out, the hash tag being #FacesUpTalks
It happens every fortnight….on Wednesday and is about mentoring and proper role-modeling our people, into a better world that we so much yearn for
It’s a step alright…in the right direction of tearing down injustice, from the roots and reaching many more people in the process.

Photo credit: sayfty.org

See how the Sayfty Chat has constantly given me that push to fight injustice?