How to Not Be An Entitled Mentalist
by Joy Abraham
Kate insists that her region has gone way beyond the introductory of climate awareness. Having had multiple floods and a recent wind storm occur, no need for defining the changing weather to even children. The screen from which this is said is like a rainbow of humans splashed across extreme regions. There is a blank textbox in one of the mini-profile boxes on zoom. It carries a name rooted from a territory unknown; in place of a face. The accent is like stretching multiple hyphens between phrases and a careful replacement of 'Es' for 'Os'. Our ears strain through the unstable temper of the internet, to drag back every word swallowed by the wind. This causes me to wonder at how impossibilities stretch to us with a twinning parcel of its opposite, often hidden behind like the aftertaste of bitter leaf. In a session when the air dished hampers of death, we are caught, sowing developmental seeds.
The alliance is said to have long been in the guts of the ‘Commonwealth Jewish Council' before getting delivered in the year 2020. This confluence is a multi-flying bird; the challenges are diverse and youth identified, and I am in the climate-changing wing of it.
As we joggle potential solutions, there arises a conflict of regional appetites; the uniqueness of our countries' climate problems: the likes of India is segmented by levels of actions being taken—advocacy and implementations inclusive—parts of East and West Africa reside on the advocacy plain, and the Pacific is elbow deep in action.
I scribble my region’s challenge onto a notepad and cast them to the faces on my screen. It is (when summarized), the long rope that is being used to climb over conservational action calls. Our mission is to strip the fire eating at the pseudo rescue line to show (how) that turning faces the other way would soon be a sumptuous menu of nothing on the plate of the next generation. Our differences spit out of the screen in every gesture, and no one seemed to try to be the other. Or maybe trials failed, quickly. Truth is, this was a confluence of almost-professionals so that every word weighed—more, from the fear of scarcity of a better one than the surety of actualization itself. As long as we were able to diagnose our territories, we searched out actions from the solution-hampers challenges hid behind. Having worked with a few earth concerned groups, this wasn’t my first but seemed very so.
I do recall:
I am trying to patch back (academic) bits of me when Ben cajoles me to join his team. I am unable to comprehend how that, leading measures to secure an Earth seemingly unsick, was reasonable at the time.
I am rewriting MTH 401 exam when the team visits the Gyero community for the first time. Gyero is a small community seated on the town’s northeast, in whose belly sat, much tin. A conception updating her in a hallmark of lands, guilty of fruitfulness. At entry, a visitor is welcomed, by the mutilated spots opening up to the sky as smelly, famished wells. Just as synonymous with mined grounds, the light brown soil, cakes in, afraid to be kind to even plants, again. This is why the team had visited them. I envision their hands soiled in a hole as they plucked seedlings from formal bases. They’d pause a bit to say ‘cheese’ to the camera, for youthfulness and record sakes, joyful to play a part in resuscitating. Before then, I had thought that folks were too engrossed to busy with saving earth and stuff. The second time, I was able to help with compiling all expenses to be lapped up by the project, for the commemoration of the day to combat desertification and drought. The team split up into different groups, leaving me with the children’s team and an insightful lecture on alien species at the American corner. Again, I am unable to tint my hands brown, planting healing seedlings for the Gyero people.
I used to think that being heroic in these spaces was to be right there at the slaughterhouse, sewing the Earth’s neck back to place. If this was true, then how where do we place couplers of surgical machines?
The thing about land restoration is that every place/land differs in solution measures. Not just because of unique diagnosis, but because of the culture, traditions, beliefs—the mental state of inhabitants, in whose hands, restoration must jointly leap or in the least, soar.
The commonwealth is simplified in an umbrella of countries whose headquarters mapped to England many years ago. And this is not to say that after independence, the Queen dusted her hands off of her once fostered nations. Now, one of such continuous links, is the platter the ‘Inter-religious Commonwealth Youth Alliance' (IRCYA) soars upon—a unity of young change-makers from commonwealth nations. Through a network of wires and rightly tuned frequencies, we layout very similar climate bullies, but, are unable to quickly do likewise, for solutions. Sometimes, ways forward readily roll into our palms for use; other times, it is in closer brooding that a right prescription pops. Eventually, the stages: problem identification, solution prescription and implementation are compulsory stops.
As the human body is a large percentage of water, so also is the soul to religion, consensually or otherwise. There is often a belief hung upwards or an unbelieve leisured someplace or nowhere, which in itself, is some sort of belief. Our team leverages this voice to sing her song through a channel of diversified faiths because only in this way can everyone dance—differently, unitedly. Places of worship are more than structures. They are an accumulation of revered voices, echoing beliefs. So that, to venture such territory requires a reasonable understanding of the guiding principles, or borrowing the voice of a recognised fellow.
We begin plotting how to make religious heads understand our plight enough to tune their followers in; slip it into worship curriculums with the voices of their revered deities, paste it on their walls like a gallery, pointing the way of retribution—resurrect actions.
You see. I have always loved the natural world, and the place from whence I write this overlooks a conglomerate of perennial, biannual and cash crops. Some nights, I’m awoken by reverberating thuds of a ripe coconut giving itself away. I’d be wide-eyed, wondering if its siblings of the same stalk had pushed it off to make room, or if it decided it was ready to fulfil its destiny. I am used to taking lone-hikes just to hear what new thing nature is gossiping, that I want to hear alone. But, one evening, at one of my favourite spots on the mountain, I realised that surrounding residents had humbled most of my shade trees into cooking fuels. My almost professional mind tells me they might have been really in need and hungry. The truth tells me their children will be more hungry, especially with no new reincarnate trees planted. I think that to love a thing isn’t automatically equal to a stand for the thing if commitments aren’t written out vividly. That was when the quiet pledge for environmental activism took place for me.
Of truth, education is my first developmental love, having seen what the deteriorating of it has caused my country. But, what wisdom is there to build a glamorous roof that would lack the beams to seat upon? There is also a knowing so expensive; only a once burnt soul can give it. For the Gyro community, to stage a talk about the mishaps laid up in indiscriminate and continuous mining of land is a waste of resources and good work-time. The recompense of it stares them in the face like an endless replay of mockery. Yet, the knowledge of pain and a resolution of higher boundaries isn’t perfectly equal to a solution. They’re taught about plants, persevering enough to break through the hardened heart of their victimized soil.
It is a similar food I’m cooking now, but with a group of intentionally selected youths of unique convictions.
Having some experience in different departments in conservation spaces, I’d say that the field and the office are just as important. If I am in a school club, taming bogus words into bits, digestible for eager earth ambassadors; at a conference or workshop, taking in overwhelming theories on the state of land and forests; bending in the dirt with locals in some remote; knitting eloquent action rhymes to feed the media streets with; either way, am I fulfilling a commitment.
In the workshop I attended at the ambassadorial space on the day to combat desertification and drought, a well-researched man talked about invasive species. He told of their dangers in the light of how cute and naive they can seem at first invasion until they have: stretched their tentacles over reasonable spaces for the poisoning, or, formed a formidable offence army. The ironic picture of such a strange plant/animal, brought in a box or cage at first fills me. But, I think of a group of people in a colony, taking much from the environment, giving nothing back—a new generation of earth-aliens. This, to me, are the new invasive species.
About
Joy Abraham is an environmental & educational advocate from Nigeria, who has worked with diverse youth-led organizations. She is a Writer & Poet, who believes in venturing development(s) through much education & all forms of art.
Joy is a coordinator with the IRCYA-Climate Change team.
