#Sayftychat is a safe and free platform…no money is charged to join in but once here, speak freely!
Did I ever tell you the actual date I fell in love with #Sayftychat? If I did, I’m here to tell you that I was lying to you! It’s because I simply can’t remember. I’m just deeply in love with #Sayftychat. Today, I’m here to tell you my story with the Sayfty Chat!
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 interest me. I interact with everything and anything while on social media
This one time while on Twitter, 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. Her conversation thread was focussed on violence against women and girls in India and how we can use social media tools to collectively address it.
I was wowed by the insights that she shared. And in between there, I saw the #SayftyChat hashtag. I had never seen it before anywhere. So, I decided to click on it and learn 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.
All you could see were “these loose strands” of conversations 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 conversations.
I managed to make my way around 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 will always be having a discussion a topic related to the safety of women and girls. She invited me to join the chat as a guest. I signed up for the same, picked a topic from their list of suggested topics and shared 5 questions with her team for discussion.
Who does this kind of thing, for you, in this day and age? I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw this! I signed up right away, to be a guest in 2017. My time on the #Sayftychat, thus far, has been soooo worth it. 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. But, right now, it’s quite easier with the use of my mobile.
Besides, I could be doing something else like taking a cold long shower or watching Arrow but no, I dedicate my Mondays to this, strictly! The energies you get to feel when here, on #Sayftychat, suck you into conversations and demand off 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 the energy to keep going! But the one thing that motivates me to pick it up is this 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 join the chat every week, prepared to have a fruitful engagement with the guest of the week and the other participants. Currently, I’m working with a youth-led organization- Faces Up Uganda. And at the beginning of this year, I thought deeply, about having something similar to #Sayftychat here. And so, we rolled it out, with the hashtag #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.
See how #Sayftychat has constantly given me that push to fight injustice?
The Author
Ntensibe Edgar Michael is from Uganda. He is a student of Community Psychology and works with Special Minds Initiative. A youth-led NGO that handles issues to do with drug-use prevention and young people. He is Sexual Reproductive Health and Rights. Follow me on Twitter