Taking the message to their doorstep
Benjamin Bissan Shekari was the son of Ishaku and Rifkatu Shekari who like most young people in their 20s was introduced into during his secondary school days. He battled to quit his addictive life for 4 years before through the help of God was able to regain his sobriety.
Following his experience on drugs, the damage done to him, he decided to reach out to his peers so they wouldn’t make similar mistake like he did.
To do this, he decided to write a book titled: Understanding Drug Abuse Youth Experience with the intention of helping his friends or whoever is involved in drug, alcohol or substance abuse. It was in the effort to secure this book that Benjamin had an accident and died in 2009.
Out of passion to assist people with drug use problem, his mother Rifkatu Shekari resigned her job as a nurse and went into fulltime counseling and sensitizing the populace on the danger of illicit drugs. For more the 12 years now, the BBSLOF is working passionately to ensure that the vision of Benjamin Bissan still lives on.
Other individual who are concern on how the scorch of addiction is spreading Kaduna state and our environment became inspired join the Shekari to seek for ways of curbing these menace. As a direct response and contribution to minimizing/eradicating addiction menace which is spreading like wild fire, BBSLOF was established in the year (11th Dec.) 2011 and is incorporated as a non-profit organization on 10th July 2012 with the Nigerian Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) Number- CAT/IT/NO. 54303
At the early state of this organization, the crux of our activities is prevention and counseling. We go around schools, camps grounds, religious gathering and jungles to creating awareness on the danger of drug and addiction. We organized seminars and workshops as part of the ways to to sensitize our target audience. Television, Radio, Print and electronic media were also implore to disseminate our message across.
Over the years, as the organization grows, we saw need to dabble into other areas that we felt may related to prevention of addiction. These areas are: peace Promotion, rights violations, health service, gender marginalization, People living with disabilities, and HIV AIDS.