Corner Brook has become a more diverse community in recent years and Roselyne Okech would like to introduce some of the city’s newer residents.
The native of Kenya has been working as a tourism studies professor at Grenfell Campus, Memorial University since 2008.
She recently attended an open house and call for volunteers at the Bay of Islands Radio station in Corner Brook and is now considering doing three shows for the community radio station.
One of those shows, which she has tentatively dubbed “Africa and Beyond,” will focus on the experiences of folks from foreign countries, like Okech herself, who have chosen to come live in Corner Brook. Each show would feature the story of an immigrant’s reason to come to western Newfoundland and how they are adapting to living here.
“It’s really difficult to live in a foreign land,” said Okech. “I think everybody assumes everything must be rosy, but it takes a lot of work because some of us don’t have our families here.”
The other two shows Okech plans are Christian ministries. She hopes to produce the prayer-focused “Living Word Devotional” every Monday as a way to get the listeners’ week off to the right spiritual start.
The second show, “Queen Esther’s Generation,” will be a Corner Brook chapter of a radio show by the same name which airs in Kenya the first Saturday of every month. The original show created by Pastor Esther Obasi-ike has a mandate of empowering women from all walks of life and expanded into North America with a new spinoff show in Virginia last October.
Okech has been given permission to start the second show in North America and hopes to have it broadcast out of Corner Brook this fall.
Women have a significant role to pay in society, politically, economically and socially, she said, and what better place to expand this show from her native country than in her new home in Corner Brook.
Her version will incorporate Okech’s own interpretation and messages with clips from the Kenyan shows.
Okech has no media background and still has to learn a few ropes when it come to putting together a radio show, let alone three of them, but she is eager to get them going soon.
While she plans to have “Living Word Devotional” run every Monday, the other two will likely only be heard once a month for now. She plans to have “Africa and Beyond” air on Wednesdays and “Queen Esther’s Generation” produced on a Saturday other than the first one of the month when the Kenyan version of it airs.
“I feel I have some things I’d like to contribute to the community because this is my second home now,” she said of why she wants to these shows.
-thewesternstar.com
That is a great job Nyar Gem