AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL POVERTY AND HUMAN RIGHTS 2009

ASSEMBLY SCRIPT

POVERTY AND
HUMAN RIGHTS
ASSEMBLY SCRIPT
 DEMAND DIGNITY – DEEP SEA
ASSEMBLY SCRIPT
Character background
These notes should help the performers
with speaking parts to prepare their roles.
You may also want to look closer at the
information supplied by the lesson plans
and film in the pack. Emphasise the
importance of creating real characters
but encourage them not to use accents
unless they can do so appropriately.
NARRATOR(S)
One person or a few people taking separate
lines or speaking together can play this part.
The person needs to be clear and able to
project their voice to ensure the audience
can understand the context of the play.
The narrators should be able to read from
the script and do not have to learn their lines.
Sometimes it helps confidence if they are
able to stand behind a lectern as they read.
SAMUEL
A 15 year-old boy, who is quite energetic
and popular. He likes school and learning
but also playing football with his friends.
He is very worried about what is happening
to his community and wants to help in any
way that he can. He is mature for his age
as he has already been through a lot.
CHARLES – dad
Samuel’s dad, a 38 year old man. Charles is
concerned for the welfare of his family and the
rest of the community. He is a very proud man
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL POVERTY AND HUMAN RIGHTS 2009
who has supported his family through the hard
times of eviction and re-building their home.
He is slightly ashamed of their cramped living
quarters but wants to show them to people so
that they will understand where they live and
how difficult it is.
REBECCA – mum
Samuel’s mother, aged 34. Rebecca is very
angry at the treatment of the community.
She hates the language used to describe
their settlement, and wants peoples attitudes
to change. She is also very worried about
diseases and the effects of extreme poverty
on the children and more vulnerable people.
She is protective of her family but wants Samuel
to be involved in helping to stop the evictions.
AKEYO – granny
Samuel’s grandmother, Rebecca’s mother, a 60
year-old woman. Akeyo is the head of the family,
the most respected member, who remembers
the first people who settled and how peaceful
it was. She is a kind woman who wants people
to feel at home wherever they are; she is
welcoming and confused as to why people
are being forced off their land.
Neema
Neema is a neighbour of Samuel’s family; she is
a 40 year-old woman. Neema advises the local
community on their rights and cooks food for
the locals in her kitchen. She has taught herself
about human rights law. She is friendly, and
always looking for ways she can help people
and give them the opportunity to have their say.
DEMAND DIGNITY – DEEP SEA

(NARRATOR)
The
Sixty years ago the world’s leaders met in Paris to agree a list of
deep sea human rights that belong to everyone, everywhere in the world,
story
regardless of their age, sex, race, religion or background. This list
is known as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It includes
our right to live in freedom and justice, our right to safety, our right
to enough food and clothing, our right to be treated fairly, our right
not to be tortured or cruelly punished, our right to travel, our right
to equal treatment, our right to think, to speak and to have an
opinion, our right to meet, to work, to have an education, our right
to a home and to healthcare.

Our assembly today comes from the human rights organisation

Amnesty International. Amnesty International works to defend
everyone’s human rights and takes action to protect people
whenever and wherever fairness, truth, freedom and justice
have been denied.

Here is my friend Sam, a young man from Kenya. He is going to

take you on an imaginary journey to explore human rights.

(SAM)
Hi! Or ‘Jambo!’, as we say in Swahili. My name is Sam. It’s good to
meet you guys. I’d like to invite you all to come and visit my home.

First I guess you’d have to get the plane from Heathrow Airport.
Then it’s about an eight-hour flight to Kenya, where I live, in
East Africa.

OK. Look down there through the clouds. We have nearly arrived.
Kenya is on the Equator, so it’s usually pretty hot. And here’s
Nairobi, the capital city. It’s about half the size of London. The
population is nearly three million, with more than half of us living in
the shantytowns and ‘slums’ that are scattered across the city.
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL POVERTY AND HUMAN RIGHTS 2009

From the airport you’ll need to get a bus to the west of Nairobi to
find us. Get off at Westlands, a rich suburb with bright lights and
hotels and shopping arcades and embassies and the posh estates
where the wealthy live. Where you get off the bus it’s the end of
the road. To reach our home you’ve got to make your way along
a narrow mud path and down into the ravine. At the bottom you’ll
find the shantytown where we live. You won’t find it on any map.
It’s called Deep Sea settlement. That’s a funny name as we’re
nearly six thousand feet above sea level here and the ocean is 200
miles away. All right, we’re nearly there. Make your way down this
narrow alleyway. Sorry about the piles of rubbish and the terrible
smell. Please watch where you tread. We turn sharp left here.
There’s my Dad’s handcart and some of the kids. And here we are,
home at last. And here’s my father!
 (DAD)
Jambo everyone, and welcome to our home. It’s good to meet
you. I’m Sam’s father. My name is Charles. I have a small business
and earn 250 Kenyan shillings, that is about three of your pounds,
a week, selling vegetables and fruit from my barrow. Jobs are
scarce around here and most of us can’t afford to feed our
families properly.

OK. I guess this place may come as a bit of a shock to you. It’s a
bit of a squash, isn’t it? Can you all see? It’s very dark. This small
shack is our home. I’m sure it’s nothing like where any of you live,
is it? They burned down our old place and so I had to rebuild
this one out of what I could find, sheets of corrugated iron and
cardboard and bits of wood and sacking. It lets the rain through,
and there’s very little electricity in Deep Sea settlement.

(SAM)
. . . and that means I don’t have a cooker, TV, computer, or fridge.
At night some of us have candles or paraffin lamps, or we use the
light of the fire to see.

(DAD)
And there’s no clean running water here, either, and no proper
toilets and no sewers, as you have seen – all the things you’re
used to, we don’t have.

And here we are all crammed into this small room. It’s just over
three metres square, with its earth floor. It’s our kitchen, our living
room and our bedroom.

Granny and my wife cook our meals and make the tea on that
smoky fire over there in the corner. This flimsy curtain separates
our bed from the place where Granny and our four children sleep.

(MUM)
Jambo, students! My name is Rebecca. I’m Sam’s mother. And
this is my mother-in-law, Granny Akeyo, the boss of our family.
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL POVERTY AND HUMAN RIGHTS 2009

(GRANNY)
Hello everyone! Good to meet you.

If you just hold on a minute I’ll brew up some nice Kenyan tea
for you all. They sell it in your country in Sainsbury’s. I expect
you drink it at home. There are huge tea plantations up in the
Highlands near here. We’ll borrow some spare cups from my
friend Neema’s kitchen round the corner.

There’s clean water in that 10-litre water container. Every day we

have to send the kids out to buy water at the top of the hill, fill up
the container and then carry it back home.
(MUM)
They call us ‘slum dwellers’ or ‘slum residents’ or what they called
the people in that Indian film. What was its name Sam?

(SAM)
I think it’s called Slumdog Millionaire, Mother.

(MUM)
Yeah, slum dogs… Well I really hate that word slum. It takes
away every shred of our dignity. It’s like we are no longer people
at all but have been turned into the horrible smelly rubbish that
surrounds us. Some people round here prefer to call our homes
‘informal settlements’.

(DAD)
Infernal settlements, if you ask me.

(MUM)
Well, whatever you call it, this really is no place to bring up children.
There are so many killer illnesses round here. Most of them are the
illnesses of poverty. And what is so terrible is that they could all
be easily prevented. Most of us get malaria; that is carried by the
mosquitoes that breed in the stagnant pools round here. We get
typhoid and dysentery from bad sanitation and polluted water, and
then there’s that horrible disease TB or Tuberculosis; it flourishes
in these damp and overcrowded conditions. It used to kill lots of
people in your country, but now it’s quite rare there. Here it’s on the
rampage.

And now there is HIV/AIDS, the biggest killer of all. One in 12 of us

suffer from it in Kenya.

(DAD)
. . . and hunger is everywhere here, my friends. Our people’s diet is
poor and sometimes there is not enough food to go round. AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL POVERTY AND HUMAN RIGHTS 2009

(SAM)
In your country is it really true that many children are getting ill from
eating too much food? There are not enough doctors and hospitals
here. They are too expensive for us anyway.

(DAD)
We did manage to get our children some education. Sam has had
three years of schooling. The church gave us his school uniform.

(SAM)
Only some of my friends were at school with me though. Not
everyone gets to go.
 (DAD)
Many of the children in Deep Sea don’t go to school. Their families
can’t afford to pay. The government says it will make primary and
secondary education free for all, but that’s not the reality for many.

(Neema)
Hi there, everybody! My name is Neema. Jambo! I run a small food
kitchen and I help in the Legal Advice Centre just round the corner,
letting people know what their rights are.

Here are some cups for you. How’s the family? They are looking
good, and I see that you’ve managed to rebuild your place after
that lot made you all homeless.

(MUM)
Yes, Charles rebuilt it. But that forced eviction really was awful.
They arrived in trucks suddenly in the middle of the night. Then
the Police began to fire tear gas, and we were choking. Then
bulldozers started smashing everything up.

(SAM)
We tried to link arms in a line in front of the bulldozers. We shouted
out, ‘No evictions!’ and we sang that song that you taught us,
Neema, but then the fires started. Over a hundred homes were
destroyed. I don’t know how many hundreds of us were made
homeless.

(DAD)
Some of the people with them said they were the landowners and
the development company and some were government officials.
They called us ‘illegal trespassers’ and said we were ‘squatters’ on
land that they owned

(GRANNY)
But we have been here for over 40 years. When we first came
to settle here this was forest land. It was land that didn’t belong
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL POVERTY AND HUMAN RIGHTS 2009

to anyone.

(Neema)
Yes, that’s true. Well it’s true in theory, anyway. Kenya has agreed
to international human rights laws that forbid forced evictions. And
under Kenyan law if people have lived anywhere for 12 years then
they have a legal right to be on that land. Forced evictions like the
ones that keep happening in Deep Sea are illegal. The Judge in the
Court said that the people who evicted you had no proper court
order or right to do what they did.
 (MUM)
But the law is just not working, Neema. Those evictions keep
happening. What can we do?

(Neema)
Well there’s going to be a human rights demonstration next week
in Nairobi, outside the Ministry of Land. Could you come? We are
making banners and placards in my kitchen this afternoon. Maybe
the students could come along to help?

(DAD)
Yes, sure we’ll come. My placard is going to say:
EVERYONE HAS THE RIGHT TO A STANDARD OF LIVING
ADEQUATE FOR HEALTH AND WELLBEING.
That’s Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

(MUM)
Bad water makes me sick. My placard is going to say:
TO GROW KIDS JUST ADD CLEAN WATER.

(GRANNY)
My placard is going to be:
GRANNY SAYS STOP FORCED EVICTIONS.

(SAM)
My placard is going to say:
EVERYONE HAS THE RIGHT TO EDUCATION.
That’s Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, Dad.

(Neema)
. . . and we’re making a big banner with Amnesty International.
Maybe the students can help to paint it.
It is going to say:
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL POVERTY AND HUMAN RIGHTS 2009

(ALL)
HUMAN RIGHTS FOR DEEP SEA PEOPLE!
take
action!
www.amnesty.org.uk/povertyaction
www.amnesty.org.uk/povertyaction