John Muyamba
Rundu-First Lady Monica Geingos has appealed to all Namibian communities to develop a sense of community parenting to care for every Namibian child.
Namibians are starting to live a more westernised life, where they seem concerned only about their immediate family members, Geingos noted with concern and advised that Namibians must not only help their family members, but must learn to help others, even the ones they do not know.
“Our children are suffering. And those children that we are neglecting and leaving, because they are not our children, those are the children who are coming to rob us. Those are the children who will come and grab your cellphone in the street, because there was nobody to guide them,” she told a community meeting at Sikanduko, south of Rundu on Wednesday.
“When you notice that somebody is not guiding their children, we all have a responsibility to all children,” Geingos emphasised.
“I’m appealing to you as a community that we go back to the community parenting that we grew up with, where if you saw a neighbour’s child doing something wrong, or you see a neighbour’s child hungry or suffering – or just somebody in the community – we started to help,” she said.
First Lady Geingos further informed the community that there are programmes in place they could benefit from, and that from next month a truckload of fish would be sent to the area.
She also promised the community that this would not be the last that they see of her as she will come back to ensure there is a change in the circumstances of the community. At the meeting it also emerged that 38 community members had received training in poultry farming and crop farming.