The Beeston Young Ladies Cooking Club recently held their showcase event which was a great success and benefit for the young ladies who are aged 11-15.
After recently securing funding from Touchstone and receiving donations from various Uncles and other sources in the community the club held a twenty-week course of cookery lessons. This gave the young ladies opportunities to learn and grow, ultimately showing off these learnt skills at the showcase event.
The girls stepped out of their comfort zone and cooked a variety of Gambian dishes for the gathered crowd. They chose Gambian food as a way of sharing their cultures and backgrounds. Their parents hailed from Gambia and the club believe in diversity, accepting and sharing cultural differences.
Leeds is a very diverse area with rich cultural history and backgrounds close together. It is always wonderful to see these communities and vast array of cultural heritages celebrated and shared.
Fanta Sanneh originally came up with the idea as boys play football at the weekend and the girls were left behind bored so cookery lessons would both help with the boredom and allow the girls to learn a new and valuable skill.
Many of the girls came to the project fresh and without a knowledge of cooking. The new life skills they learnt from this project will stay with the girls forever and can be passed onto other people to further extend the reach of this project.
Perhaps in the future a similar project could run again reaching more young girls in the community who find themselves bored in their spare time or would like to learn new life skills which will benefit themselves and those around them.
The showcase event, held at Beeston’s Hamara Centre, ran smoothly and was well attended featuring speeches from various people extending a genuine outpouring of open-ended gratitude that the project was funded and enabled to run so successfully.
Following the speeches dinner was served with further speeches from Councillor Paul Wray and Bampha Jaiteh, Chairman of Gambia Welfare Society Leeds who worked with Yanks Sawo to co-ordinate the project.
Finally, to show further gratitude there was a presentation of flowers and cards to the mentors: Ajie Fatou Jeng Secka, Fatoumata Bah Sawo and Amie Kolly Darboe Sawo.
