Frank Nyakairu

FRANK NYAKAIRI
KAMPALA

Thomas Christensen a worried father. “Stop!” he yells at Molly and Maya. “Please make sure you seek the turning on so you take this side,” he directs the two. The two; Molly, 3 and Maya, 6 are but not on any busy highway
But he wants to make them feel so. “I want my girls to grow up understanding the dangers of raising a girl in a busy city like Copenhagen ,” he tells Urban. Thomas had taken off time from his busy schedule to a high miniature in the center of Copenhagen. The girls were most of the time seated in toy car driving through the driveways specifically designed for children. Thomas’s fear is shared among several parents in Denmark. Children on foot are more likely to be killed in road accidents in many busy European cities like the Danish capital Copenhagen. The Danish National Road Safety Action Plan identifies children and young people as specific groups at risk in traffic - and suggests concrete activities to reduce children’s exposure to accidents on the roads. According to figures by the European Environment and Health Committee, Mortality data, leading causes of accidental deaths 1995-2000 is responsible Traffic 55 percent of deaths in Denmark. _The governmental health plan focuses on reducing the social inequality in health, enhancing life expectancy and enhancing years lived with high quality of life. In achieving these goals, physical activity plays a key role. An active life helps prevent lifestyle diseases, which the government has in focus in their health plan for 2002 - 2010. In order to achieve these goals joint responsibility is crucial and partnerships must be made. To motivate children to a physically active life, the child, family and community are all responsible and responsibility must be taken in children’s everyday life: kindergartens, schools, sport clubs, neighborhoods and families.With booming social security and health care in Denmark, disease, nutrition and educations are lowest on Thomas list of worries. “We most of the times have little time to ensure that we drop and pick the children at school and studies have shown that they are the most endangered groups on Danish roads. Keeping keen attention on his daughters, Thomas is sure he is making a difference in Molly’s and Maya’s lives. “This is not different from a highway and I believe that if you train children how to use the road as driver and pedestrian you can save them a lot of problems,” says Thomas. “By the time Molly grows he can enroll in a driving school at 18 years,” says adding, “By this time the road safety culture will part of her life.

FRANK NYAKAIRU
COPENHAGEN

After a year of hard work writing scripts for television, Morten Drausted is happy to take off six week from the routine. But usually busy professional will not be spending this one and half months traveling around the world or skiing in Greenland but baby seating his newly born. He is sure he likes the usually unmanly venture of handling months old baby, like many other other danish men who decides to take care of the new child while its mothers starts working.
Its is parental leave a product of equal parenting to champion gender equality–one of the major socio-economic transformations of the last twenty-five years in Western Europe. With women’s increased participation in the labour force, men are paid Government to take up things like baby seating. Seated on a wood bench in a park in the middle of Copenhagen, Morten is shaking the milk bottle. His four month-old daughter giggles in tender baby voice from its baby carrier. “I think a lot of men have not discovered what I have discovered in the last few weeks,” Morten says as he feeds the baby rested on his left forearm. “I did not know how much fun a woman has with her baby. Since I started taking off my six week I have loved every moment with my daughter.” Morten wife works as a web designers and at the summer afternoon, Morten was baby seating, his wife was away to work. The two have been married for almost ten years. “As a busy father, I get to understand and appreciate what my wife goes through.” He says cleaning milk spillovers from the baby’s mouth. “I get what I think are my best moments in my life, when I think I am communicating with someone for the first time,” he said. Gender equality policy is still an important subject of everyday life between the sexes in Denmark and is considered to have made steadfast progress.
But Morten things there are still many aspects of women in society that need to be explored. “We are tending towards that but there is still a long way to go,” he says adding “in fact total equality is not possible because in most case man and woman are completely different.” He is surprised that his wife is sometimes jealous over his Dad-daughter relationship, a feeling he does imagine men having. By doing this Morten is evidence that the Denmark’s gender equality policies are moving in the right direction. The Danish Government wishes to create equal opportunities for women and men. The goal is for women and men to be considered equal and that they are granted the same opportunities to choose the life they want. The Government wants to ensure that diversity and individual freedom are respected.
But thought Morten is happy to do some female inclined chores, he pushed the baby carrier still insisting; “I am sure that state of total equality is us not achievable.”

FRANK NYAKAIRU
COPENHAGEN

Many countries in the world are still grappling with one of life’s most critical need; Education. But in some countries like Denmark in the developed world, education is not only a deserved right but also fully granted. There is no compulsory schooling in Denmark, but all children must participate in education for 9 years from the year of their 7th birthday.
Kasper Jensen, 7 years old is a beneficiary of this initiative.
“I started my first year a month ago. Last year I was in preschool the same place and with the same class, it was called 0 grade,” says Kasper.
Kasper is particularly happy with the relationship his class has with the teacher especially the teacher-pupil ratio.
“…when my teacher wants us to shut up, she just claps a her hands … we are not too many - only 24 pupils - we sit in small groups in the class room,” says Kasper.
“Last year the groups got a mark on the blackboard every time they misbehaved. My group only had two marks a week because we helped each other to be still when the teacher told us to,” he added.
Three main types of education are available – the municipal Folkeskole, private schools and private instruction at home. Most Danish children 87 percent go to the Folkeskole, which is free of charge. 12 percent go to private schools, which charge instruction fee. Only 1 percent is educated at home.
In the Danish education system a dialogue on equal terms between students and teachers is valued highly, and many foreigners find the informal atmosphere striking. Traditionally, Danish schools do not focus solely on academic skills, but emphasise the personal development of the students and train their abilities to cooperate and participate in social activities. Democracy and shared experiences are given priority, and an effort is made to strengthen the critical sense of the students. One of the major milestones of folkeskolen is cooperation with the parents – further the pupils’ acquisition of knowledge, skills, working methods and ways of expressing themselves and thus contribute to the all-round personal development of the individual pupil.
Peter Jensen, Kaspers father, a university graduate who works as a leadership consultant, likes the Danish system.
“To me it’s a right,” says Jensen 36. “But it is also a right that we pay for in our tax system so that less fortunate families can also afford to send their children to school.” “Every child must learn how to read and write and access higher education as well,” he says. Jensen and his family pay 55-60 percent in taxes. But he worries less about service delivery on government’s side.
“In Denmark we pay a relatively high tax so that they can build hospitals, schools, roads and so on. Its a matter of social awareness and I believe that the foundation of a well functioning democracy is education to all.”

FRANK NYAKAIRU

COPENHAGEN

Ahmed Nabulsi 15 considers his family lucky. He is going to school, has got access to his basic needs and his family it affords a holiday trip to back home in Beirut occasionally. But the happy, youthful and energetic Nabulsi is oblivious of how he ended up in a Nordic country like Denmark. As he gears to kick a football at a green patch at their Bisperbia suburb outside Copenhagen, his mother Ghada Kiblam gazes at him as she recalls of the condition she and her husband left Beirut in 1991. From 1975 until the early 1990s Lebanon suffered a bloody civil war in which regional powers - particularly Israel, Syria and the Palestine Liberation Organisation - used the country as a battlefield for their own conflicts . “When we came here we had totally nothing we lost everything in the war so we had to start afresh,” said Ghada. Processionless, she and her husband chose to come to Denmark. From 1945 to the late 1980s, the small Scandinavian Denmark was characterized by the absence of poverty or at least by the lack of any debate over poverty. However, by the mid-1980s and 90s, the presence of new forms of poverty dominantly in migrant communities and this is what
Nabulsi’s was part.
Today, Ghada has two children and she is “not complaining but we can live better”
“Though we have everything is not enough. Though My husband works at his vegetable shop and we get help from Government its can not be enough,” said Ghada as she rubbed Nabulsi’s head. “He will ask for new and trendy clothes, shoes and other things all the time to match an ordinary Danish child but I cannot provide all of them.” For months she had been limping from a sprained leg and for that reason she was receiving cash handouts for being unable to work. But at the time Urban visited her she was under pressure to be scrapped off the handout list and resume work. “The officials are saying they are going to stop giving me help but look at me my leg still hurts,” she said.
She said rent for their two-bedroom apartment is the biggest cost. “My biggest living expense is rent. I pay 5,000 kn per moth while I pay 1,075 KN for television minus daily living expense,” she said adding “but almost the 7,000kn my husband makes and the 8000kn we receive from the community is spent and we do not save.” Nabulsi’s family is many of hither-to poor non-EU migrant families in Denmark, which according to the European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research, fare badly in relative terms.
Poverty rate is not particularly high in European comparison. “…migrants experience lower (or about the same) poverty levels than the national average in Denmark,’ the report said Denmark is one of the world’s most highly-taxed countries as a percentage of the total economy, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, but the country’s cradle-to-grave welfare system offers free health care and schooling that also directly benefits the migrants as people like Nabulsi are able to live a better life against all odds.

Velkommen til Urbanblog.dk. Dette er dit første indlæg. Rediger det eller slet det.
Hvis du er i tvivl om hvordan du gør, så kig i venstre side af forsiden på urbanblog.dk - der er hjælp og tips til hvordan du bliver en god blogger.