Mali

Cheick Oumar Sangare
23 years old

Cheick Oumar Sangaré is one of the program’s beneficiaries. He is a joiner and has his own workshop set up with the project’s support and located in a Bamako neighbourhood, Kalabancoura.

Cheik Oumar is currently living in his own self-made family house with his mother, brother and sisters, where he is sharing a bed with his brother. As their house is considered illegal they have been affected by the State housing who took an important part of their plot in order to build a road. The District authority gave them a new plot attribution but they have to pay between 100 and 500 000 CFA to become owners. They don’t have enough money to pay for this: Cheik Oumar’s brother started to pay but he hasn’t sufficient money to support the payments. All his earnings are used for the family daily expenses.

Workshop

From the 10 children that Cheik Oumar’s mother gave birth to, only five are alive today: Cheik Oumar, an older brother, two older sisters (one got married and doesn’t live with them anymore) and one 12 year old sister who became blind. His mother lost three daughters and two sons who all died in infancy. The children’s father had two wives and had one further child with his second wife before he died. This wife lives in another neighbourhood of Bamako.

Cheik Oumar’s father worked as a builder’s assistant and his mother used to sell sand, which is used to wash dishes. She stopped selling sand because of her age. His brother is a tailor and his older sister, who lives with them, is a mango and fish itinerant seller, depending on the season and the time of year.

Like all of his brothers and sisters, Cheik Oumar didn’t go to school and hadn’t the opportunity to ask his father why because he died too early. He started work as a shop assistant in his neighbourhood market and managed to play football some of the time. One of his brother’s friends who was apprentice in a joiner workshop invited him to practice joinery and carpentry. He was accepted as an apprentice in this workshop when he was between 10 and 13 years old.

During his time in this workshop, Cheik Oumar experienced some difficulties with some of his bosses who subjected him to heavy load transport (too heavy for his age). Sometimes these bosses used to hit him. This workshop was far from his house and he had to walk a lot because there was no possibility to go by car or bus. He decided to stop going there and stayed home.

Sanagre at work

After a time he started working as carpenter with a friend of his brother. They worked together for two and a half years when the local NGO CJDS informed him that they were recruiting young people to train them. After training, he continued working as a joiner with different contracts and stayed in contact with the training centre for three years. He knew about the J&D project through this centre and applied to be funded which permitted him to set up his own joinery workshop. He now has apprentices with whom he works from Monday to Saturday and even, some weeks, on Sunday.

His daily activities are as follows:

• he wakes up at 6:00 in the morning and gets washed;
  
• he has breakfast at home;
  
• he goes to his workshop between 7:00 and 8:00;
  
• he works all day long if necessary (according to the work he has);
  
• he has lunch between 1:00 and 2:00 pm with 10 to 30 minutes free;
  
• he leaves the workshop between 7:00 and 8:00 pm and goes directly home;
  
• when he arrives, he gets washed;
  
• he has dinner and takes malian tea;
  
• some days, he goes to his friend’s (not far from his house, about 100metres);
  
• some weeks, on Saturday evenings, he goes to his friend’s and may stay there for a longer time;
  
• Generally, he goes to sleep before midnight.

Cheik Oumar likes football and played regularly before he set up his own workshop.
Today, he doesn’t have enough time to play football but he continues to like it.

He would like the program’s partners to support him in his administrative problems with the District authority. J&D and the Malian network of the programme in Mali are in contact with the appropriate institution and are working to resolve the problem.

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Cheick Oumar Sangare

 

 

 

 

 

Workshop

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Workshop

 

 

 

 

Carpentry