OGOW means 'to know': Canadian man helping Somalis understand COVID-19

aaa
March 04, 2021

Jessamyn Stanley needs you to know what yoga is really about - and it's not the poses. In her new book Yoke: My Yoga of Self-Acceptance, the yoga instructor and body activist shares reflective personal essays that touch upon everything from racism to the cultural appropriation of American yoga, from consumerism to cannabis. And while the timing couldn't be better considering the current cultural climate, the idea for the book came to her years ago while she was writing her first book, Every Body Yoga, a guide to developing a yoga practice. "I realized yoga is a lot more than postures," she tells PEOPLE. "The postures get to be more complicated, not because you're practicing harder gymnastics or physical postures, but because you're practicing emotional and mental and really spiritual postures." In fact, she says, yoga is not supposed to feel good. Take the example of someone expecting a Zen-like experience from a yoga practice - only to be disappointed. "You're like, 'This is hard. Everyone else seems to know what they're doing. I am not good enough, I shouldn't be doing this, maybe my body is supposed to look different, maybe my life's supposed to be different.' All these feelings start to come up. That's what the postures are leading you towards, is to have that experience." RELATED: Jessamyn Stanley Found Body Acceptance Through Yoga and Can Help You Do the Same Stanley has been nurturing this self-awareness in the nearly 10 years since she has been breaking barriers in the yoga world, tackling topics like fat-shaming, her queer Black identity and unattainable beauty standards. In Yoke - which means yoga in Sanskrit - she uses her own life as a a metaphor to further explore the coming together of mind and body, light and the dark, good and the bad - both on and off the mat. "I wanted to reflect on what it is to practice yoga when we are as a society being forced to reckon with the long, deep, systemic, down-to-the-bone problems. We're being forced to look at things that we've never wanted to look at. And that's all that yoga is, is looking at the things that you don't want to look at. And ultimately, come hell or high water, accepting them." Story continues Workman Publishing

 Before Canadian Khalid Hashi and his team began their work in Somalia, the country of about 15 million people who mostly speak Somali and Arabic only had information about COVID-19 in one language.

Canadian Khalid Hashi, right, shows videos about COVID-19 in his app OGOW EMR in Garowe, Puntland, Somalia, to front-line nurses and health-care workers in an undated handout photo. Before Hashi created the app, which contains information in Somali and Arabic about the novel coronavirus, Somalia only had public health messages about COVID-19 in English. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO-Khalid Hashi

“It was all in English,” says the Somali-Canadian, who was born in Ontario and raised in Edmonton.

The 30-year-old says he travelled to the Horn of Africa last spring to help kick-start a digital information campaign that would address concerns, misinformation and rumours about the novel coronavirus in a way communities and villages could understand.

“Initially, people were very hesitant to listen,” says Hashi, who has since returned to his home in Edmonton.

“There’s misinformation across every community. It was challenging and it still is challenging. But now there’s more information every day on the virus, and people are starting to understand the seriousness of the virus.”

Hashi says with the approval of Somalia’s health ministry, he expanded an app he had created three years earlier to include videos and information about COVID-19 in the local languages. Front-line workers in Somalia went door-knocking to 45 villages and continue to show the videos on tablets.

“This content, (that is) really helping with prevention and risk mitigation, has scaled across four regions, has reached 60,000 (nomads) and there’s about 100,000 impressions on social media,” he says.

His team has since incorporated features on the app that send communities emergency health alerts about the pandemic.

Somalia has just over 5,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and more than 1,000 that are active. About 144 people have died of the infection, said Abdihamid Warsame, a research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Right now he’s based in Somalia working on a research project on COVID-19.

“There’s quite a lot of misinformation about the disease, that it doesn’t really exist in Somalia, and it’s a disease of foreigners. People don’t really take the precautions that they should. And I think Khalid’s work is doing a lot to try and overcome this challenge,” Warsame said.

“There have been fewer and fewer cases as time has gone by. Khalid’s expertise and his material and his distribution channels are definitely helping to contribute toward the COVID-19 response in Somalia.”

Hashi says Somalia’s health ministry reviews the app’s content and makes sure it resonates with communities.

“We’re not talking about a village. We’re talking national distribution of this content.”

Public health videos educate locals on symptoms they should be looking for and on where people can get tested.

“It really helps guide people for next steps on how to stay safe.

“We did our first video for a hospital that we were working with to help support our doctors. Doctors would show the video to their patients … people saw value (in that) and now that content is going to rural communities.”

Hashi says some of the videos he and his team have created in Arabic are being used in Yemen.

The idea for Hashi’s original app came to him in 2017 when he was visiting his grandmother. He was taking her to a doctor appointment when he learned Somalia didn’t have a good way to track medical records.

He ended up designing OGOW Electronic Medical Records to store patients’ health details.

“OGOW means ‘to know’ in the Somali language,” Hashi says. “I named it that because it’s me getting to know my grandmother. It’s a constant reminder of why I got into this work.”


Source

Jessamyn Stanley needs you to know what yoga is really about - and it's not the poses. In her new book Yoke: My Yoga of Self-Acceptance, the yoga instructor and body activist shares reflective personal essays that touch upon everything from racism to the cultural appropriation of American yoga, from consumerism to cannabis. And while the timing couldn't be better considering the current cultural climate, the idea for the book came to her years ago while she was writing her first book, Every Body Yoga, a guide to developing a yoga practice. "I realized yoga is a lot more than postures," she tells PEOPLE. "The postures get to be more complicated, not because you're practicing harder gymnastics or physical postures, but because you're practicing emotional and mental and really spiritual postures." In fact, she says, yoga is not supposed to feel good. Take the example of someone expecting a Zen-like experience from a yoga practice - only to be disappointed. "You're like, 'This is hard. Everyone else seems to know what they're doing. I am not good enough, I shouldn't be doing this, maybe my body is supposed to look different, maybe my life's supposed to be different.' All these feelings start to come up. That's what the postures are leading you towards, is to have that experience." RELATED: Jessamyn Stanley Found Body Acceptance Through Yoga and Can Help You Do the Same Stanley has been nurturing this self-awareness in the nearly 10 years since she has been breaking barriers in the yoga world, tackling topics like fat-shaming, her queer Black identity and unattainable beauty standards. In Yoke - which means yoga in Sanskrit - she uses her own life as a a metaphor to further explore the coming together of mind and body, light and the dark, good and the bad - both on and off the mat. "I wanted to reflect on what it is to practice yoga when we are as a society being forced to reckon with the long, deep, systemic, down-to-the-bone problems. We're being forced to look at things that we've never wanted to look at. And that's all that yoga is, is looking at the things that you don't want to look at. And ultimately, come hell or high water, accepting them." Story continues Workman Publishing