如何将你的不满变为行动 Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr: How to turn your dissatisfaction into action

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Sometimes, you have a negative feeling about things. You're not happy about the way things are going.

You feel frustrated and dissatisfied, and so often, we choose to live with it. It's a negative that we tell ourselves we have to endure.

And yet, I passionately believe that we all have the ability to turn that negative feeling into a positive by allowing our dissatisfaction to give birth to change. On January 6,1999, I was working in London when the news channels began to report the rebel invasion of my hometown, Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Thousands of people lost their lives, and there were bodies littering the streets of Freetown. My husband's elderly aunt was burned alive, and I thought of my own two-year old as I saw images of little children with amputated limbs.

Colleagues said to me, "How could we help?" I didn't know, so I began to call the telephone numbers that came up on my screen as international aid agencies started to make appeals to raise money to address the tragedy.

The vagueness of those telephone conversations disappointed me. It felt like the people who were raising the money seemed so far removed from the crisis, and understandably so, but I wasn't satisfied and I wasn't convinced that the interventions they would eventually implement would actually have the level of impact that was so clearly needed.

There were butterflies in my stomach for days as I continued to watch horrors unfold on television, and I continuously asked myself, what could I be doing? What should I be doing?

What I wanted to do was to help children affected by the war. So that's what we did.

Myself, my sister and some friends started the Sierra Leone War Trust For Children, SLWT. We decided to focus on the thousands of displaced people that fled the fighting and were now living in really poor, difficult conditions in camps in Freetown.

Our work started with the Ross Road Camp at the east end of the city. Working with a local health organization, we identified about 130 of the most vulnerable single mothers with children under the age of five, supporting them by providing business skills, microcredit, whatever they asked us.

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