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By Adrian Florido
The evening’s cooks were so prolific that there was food to spare. At the end of our recent community event on food access in City Heights, Djoha Uwamwiza sent people home with leftovers.
It was an added perk. The evening event — a collaboration of voiceofsandiego.org, KPBS, the Media Arts Center and the AjA Project — featured great conversation with bright minds who have been working to improve access to nutritious food in City Heights.
There were women like Uwamwiza, who recently started a cooking group for Swahili-speaking refugees as a way to stave off loneliness and stay connected to the countries they left.
Though City Heights is a vibrant community full of refugees, Uwamwize found that Swahili-speaking women felt isolated living there. Cooking groups like hers have helped ease the transition and brought women together around food to talk about the challenges of raising a family in a new community.
Below are two videos of the event produced by youth reporters in Mobile Stories, a program by local libraries and Media Arts Center San Diego that teaches youth to produce citizen journalism with cell phones. The first focuses on the refugee moms and daughters who cooked traditional East African foods for the event. The second is an overview of the day’s discussion on food justice.