When petrol prices go high, we complain that the Government has to do something. Carpooling or use of public transport is not practiced. When drains get clogged with plastic bags and create flooding of the city, we shout out saying the Municipal corporation is not doing its job right. When the taps in the house are leaking, we turn a Nelson’s eye and let the water drain out. how do we bring in the right attitude among the adults.
Let me share two inspirational stories about two young kids who brought in a sea- change in the thinking of adults.
Greta Thunberg
Greta is a 17-year-old who grew up in Stockholm, in Sweden. Greta’s mother, Malena Ernman, is an opera singer and former Eurovision Song Contest participant. Her father, is an actor, and is a descendant of Svante Arrhenius, a scientist who came up with a model of the greenhouse effect. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1903. The elder of two girls, Greta says she learned about climate change when she was eight, and that her parents were not climate activists. Greta has Asperger’s syndrome, a developmental disorder, and has described it as a gift and calls herself as being different.
In May 2018, aged 15, Greta won a climate change essay competition in a local newspaper. Three months later, in August, she started protesting in front of the Swedish parliament building, vowing to continue the protest until the Swedish government met the carbon emissions target agreed upon in 2015.
She wielded a placard that read “School Strike for Climate”. Her protests went viral on social media and as support for her cause grew. By December 2018, more than 20,000 students from Australia, UK, Belgium, the US and Japan had joined her. In September 2019, she travelled to New York to address a UN climate conference. She made her way there on a racing yacht, in a journey that lasted two weeks because she would not travel by air. Addressing the conference, she lambasted the politicians for relying on young people for answers to climate change.
She was named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year 2019. At this time, she was all of 16 years of age.
Ryan’s well Foundation
One day in January 1998, in the Grade One classroom, Mrs. Prest, explained to the students that people were sick and some were even dying because they didn’t have clean water. She said that some people walked for hours in Africa and sometimes it was just to get dirty water..
Ryan was surprised with this information. He went home and begged his mom and dad to help. After a few days, they told him he could do extra chores to earn the money. Ryan wanted to build a well.. He worked for four months to earn $70. Then he learned that it was actually going to cost $2,000 to build a well in a place like Uganda.
He started speaking to service clubs, school classes, to anyone who would listen to his story so that he could raise money for the first well at Angolo Primary School in Uganda. That’s how his little Grade One project became the Ryan’s Well Foundation.
If these two youngsters could work to make a difference to the world, I am sure others can too. i believe, ‘We have not inherited this earth from our forefathers; we have borrowed it from our children’.
The U.N. put forward 15 Sustainable development goals, [SDG] in 2015. Unfortunately, most of our young generation is not even aware of these let alone practice it. Life skills seem to be the best way to introduce these SDG to the school Kids.
NEP 2020 mentions that teaching cannot be done in silo. Can we link SDG with other subjects? Should we introduce SDG through Life Skills? There is one organisation as far as my knowledge goes that is linking life skills to SDG. -www. goldensparrowhub.com
My latest book deals with SDGs and life. Dont miss The Ultimate To Do list for Humanity.