I remember walking into the We Hear You launch performance last year, here in Washington, DC. The performance took place within the climate photography exhibit Coal & Ice at the Kennedy Center. And I remember being struck by the stark, bright, some of them kind of startling images, seeing people’s faces and landscapes—and all of them being looked upon by a crowd of people who came from, I think, positions of privilege that we are often probably not adequately aware of.

I settled into my seat ready to see some of the artists tell their stories—very similarly to how we are today—and in the background, projected on a screen behind the stage, was a beautiful picture of Mount Everest, which is the tallest mountain in the world and in the Himalayas. And I just remember feeling a little ping, like a little knot somewhere—you know, that you can sometimes feel in your stomach—when I looked down at the bottom of the picture and saw that it said “Tibet, China.” (read aloud as “Tibet comma China”)

And I remember that comma. And I remember thinking, “Wow! We’re in a space with so many people in positions of power, listening to people’s stories of indigenous contexts that are being washed over, and yet we’re still in a space where we have to include that comma.”

My father grew up in the Himalayas in a home we know as Tibet without the comma, in a home in a small town called Qüxü, with a family whom I’ve never been able to meet in person. My father always talked about the rivers, the mountains, the valleys that he grew up in about thirty minutes outside of Lhasa. And he always tells us this one story about how he and his brothers and his friends would swim absolutely naked in a river that would come down out of the foothills, called Yarlung Tsangpo, and the water was so clear you could just put your hand all the way to the bottom and still see it.

That was unimaginable to me growing up in central Texas, near water that you could definitely not see the bottom of. In our creek, with drought striking every year, we were lucky if water was even there. But my father’s story always felt so vivid in my mind.

And I remember just sitting there at the performance looking at the mountains, and the first feeling that came after that initial pang was a little bit of a feeling of guilt, almost. Who was I to feel sad about a place that I had never even been able to find my own way to? But then the feeling that came after was anger. Because it wasn’t my fault that I’ve never been able to go.

But even still, it’s… it’s so hard sometimes to try to wrap my mind around feeling connected to a place and to a space I’ve never been to, and a place that, you know, used to be normal, and used to be my father’s normal and everyday. I think he never knew that one day he wouldn’t be able to go back. And that makes me think that you just never know what’s normal until it’s gone, right? Like maybe someday, my normal right now, maybe the little river behind my parents’ house now in central Texas, or being able to just walk outside and walk down the street, wearing whatever I want to, or breathing in the air the way that I do, will be a story that I just pass on to someone who will hold onto it and grow an identity around it, in the same way that I have around that river and the mountains and a space that I’ve never gotten to witness in person.

I’m from Sweden. I live in Stockholm, which is the capital of Sweden, and I am going to tell you about a memory that I have from when I was five, six years old.

I remember, it was this snowy and cold day in December. And me and my older brother, William, and my parents, we decided that we were gonna go sledding. So we put on all of our warmest clothes, and we went to the nearest park, and we were there for like hours, just going up and down the slope, racing each other, laughing. And I remember that I was (laughs)—I was sitting on the sled, and I was just like yelling at my dad, like, “You have to turn right!” Because he was about to hit a tree!

And, yeah (taking a moment to remember)—it was just the best day. And by the time we left, it was dark, and it was still snowing. And there were these lights, lighting up all the roads, and it was really like Christmastime, and I was seeing people walking around with Christmas trees, and my dad was dragging my sled after him, and I was sitting on it. And I remember that I lay down on it, and I… was just looking up into the sky, and I felt all of these snowflakes on my face. And you, know, I just thought, “What a marvelous thing snow is! It’s beautiful!”

And I often think about that memory, when I imagine what a perfect snow day is supposed to be like. But even though it’s a beautiful memory, it also gets me a bit upset. Because, like every year since that day, the summers have been getting a lot warmer, and we have been getting less snow every winter. And…like every time the snow melts away, it’s like a reminder of what is happening.

And by not doing something, we are ruining the future, for all of our coming generations. And, I mean, we are the only people who can fix this. And you know, that is why I’m telling you all this story, because I want change. I want every little girl who is going to be living in my town in the future to be able to experience her perfect snow day, just like I did.

Thank you.

Lately I’ve been having a lot of nightmares. Like almost every night. And my subconscious is really present in my life. I often make decisions based on my dreams, whether it’s a nightmare or just a nice dream. And I wanted to share with you the most beautiful dream that I’ve had in my life, and how that has supported me as a person. It’s a story that comes from a dream. So.

Once I dreamt that I was in Leticia, a city on the edge of the Colombian Amazon, right by the border with Brazil and Peru. My friend Maytik was raised in Leticia, and I have always wished to travel there, so the first visit was through this dream.

I was at a birthday party in a cottage next to the Amazon River. The cottage had a small terrace that stood up with thin wooden columns. At the party, for some reason, I felt out of place, so I decided to go out to the terrace to take some fresh air. From the terrace, I could observe the river, sense the breathing trees, and hear the sounds of the night.

As I was contemplating the river in the dark, I noticed that there was an indigenous woman who was gently canoeing next to the shore. I saw that she was touching the leaves of a tree (she gestures, gently touching a leaf), followed by a small frog (gesture) and fireflies (gesture).  Every time she would touch them, they would glow for a moment in a beautiful, soft light. It was a blessing. She blessed in light everything that she touched.

I was so curious that I decided to come closer to the end of the terrace, lie down on my stomach, and stretch my arm down to the river. I wanted to see if she would come to touch my hand. She observed that I was there and slowly came to touch my hand that for a brief moment shone in the dark. I received a blessing together with the trees, frogs, and fireflies of the forest.

The next day, I decided to go canoeing with Maytik, my friend. She knew all the routes and the area. As we were canoeing, she was describing the different streams. Like: “You see over there? We can’t take that route because there are still mines and danger.” I would observe with awe how knowledgeable she was about the place. It made me feel safe. Then we stopped canoeing, she looked me straight in the eye with a glimpse of nostalgia in her face, and said “did you know that there are still 56 km-long butterflies in the Amazon?”

And I could not believe what she was saying. I thought to myself, like “What!? How is it possible that I did not know about this!? 56 km-long butterflies?!” The butterfly could not fit in my imagination, but still it was there somewhere in the vast Amazon, finding refuge in the forest that is left.

And when I woke up from this dream, I felt really blessed for the light and the 56 km-long butterfly pushing the boundaries of my imagination. But at the same time, I felt heartbroken and shaken by the certainty that there are thousands and millions of species that I don’t even know exist, forms of life that escape my imagination, and that are already threatened or extinct due to human action.

Since I had this dream, every time I have to speak up in front of a crowd as a climate activist and I want to feel grounded, I imagine that from my back there are two long butterfly wings that expand and connect with life on earth, life that is sacred and blessed with the touch of anyone who has the courage to face the environmental crisis, to speak up, and find ways to fight for climate justice and nature.

I am here to share with you my transformative story with pollinators. During the pandemic, one of my favorite activities was to read (as I think many people did), and one of my favorite readings was Staying with the Trouble by Donna Haraway, and right after that, I read Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, and I was “Ahh!”—feeling, like, blessed for having discovered them, and inspired by their ideas of multi-species relationship and collaborative survival and ethical responsibility.

I decided to establish an allowance with an endangered species, and it all started when my good friend Rodrigo, who is also a beekeeper, talked to me about the possibility of the modern city as a sanctuary for pollinators, because there is less use of pesticides, compared to the fields—where monoculture thrives, and there’s a very high use of this kind of venom for pollinators. And I was amazed by that. Because I would think that pollinators are healthier like outside the city, in the crops, but that’s not necessarily true. And especially not where I live: in Guadalajara, there’s a big, big monoculture thriving around agaves (that’s what tequila is made from), berries (a lot of berries), and avocado (because avocado right now, it’s like super in fashion…).

So I decided that I wanted to learn from pollinators: to listen to them, to observe them, so I could fight with more passion and from place that’s empowered—like the hive is, and like pollination is, as a gesture. And so, during the pandemic, I invited a queen bee to establish her house on the rooftop of my home, and on the day of the bees’ arrival, I offered the hive a mask, a plaster mask of my face, as a way to seal our new relationship. And the bees finished sculpting the mask with wax, pollen, and honey.

And lately I’ve been expanding my relationship not only with honeybees, but I have started to work with butterflies. And there is this amazing oasis-like park inside our city, which we’ve managed to preserve, and they have these— We call it mariposario, but it’s this butterfly dome. And so I’ve been working in collaboration with biologists that study caterpillars and butterflies and their symbiotic relationship with special plants, and so I’ve been going there to like feed caterpillars and feel them, and look at them. Inspired by that, and wanting to do something with butterflies, I found out about the story of the hermanas mariposas—which is “the Butterfly Sisters”.

The Butterfly Sisters were three women from República Dominicana. Their names were Patria, Minerva, and María Theresa Mirabal. And during the ‘60s, they were fighting against the dictatorship of Trujillo. I like to think that they were called the Butterfly Sisters because they were pollinating, like, ideas about resisting and ideas against gender violence. And Trujillo was hitting on one of the sisters, like flirting or wanting something with her, and of course, she didn’t want anything to do with that, and so Trujillo incarcerated the three of them. And on the 25^th of November of 1960, because of social pressure, finally Trujillo let them go. But after letting them go, somebody picked the sisters up and drove them away, and after that, their bodies were found—so they were murdered. So ever since then, every 25^th of November, it’s the commemoration of the Day Against Gender Violence.

So I was amazed at this link between butterflies, resisting, pollination, and this day. And in my country, there’s a lot of femicides and gender violence, so I wanted to do something in conversation with all that. So I developed these butterfly feeders and drinking stations made out of clay, and they are wearable ceramics. You can wear them on the central part of the neck. It’s a flower-like thing, and when you put it like this (demonstrating), there’s this little pool inside, and you put like water and a little salt, so butterflies come feed. And these pieces of the necklace feature many, many names of women who have been victims of femicide. I looked up a list of the names, and it’s not that easy, because we don’t even—there’s a lot of “gray areas,” and there’s not like official lists of all the women that have been murdered. So it was like a labor to look for that.

And the ancient Mesoamerican people used to revere the butterfly, right? It was a sacred animal. So they would take a butterfly and (demonstrating gently catching a butterfly from the air and bringing it close to her face) tell the butterfly a secret. Like “pspspspsps.” Then they would let her go. And the butterfly was believed to be a messenger for the gods and goddesses, to another level of consciousness. So what I was trying to do was like—the butterflies come, and feed, and there’s the names of all these women that have had a violent death, and it’s kind of a metaphor: the butterfly takes that away and, I don’t know, gives it another life. Another life in another level.

This is what I wanted to share with you. (And I haven’t shared with anybody because the piece is not yet ready. But it moved me a lot.) And when I was writing the names on the clay pieces, I could feel like, you know, like I had to cry. I had to cry, and my clay teacher cried with me—it was so powerful. Naming them. Their presence was there, in a joyful, good way.

Thank you.

My country, the Philippines, is made up of thousands of islands, but it was a river that bonded us together.

The Pasig River splits the metropolis in half and connects the sea to the lake within. And from her grew three kingdoms—one of which is Manila—and many other communities whose existence spans 500 to 1,000 years. The people here are called “people from the river,” or taga-ilog (which eventually became Tagalog). And it’s to these people that I owe my heritage, for I am a Tagalog as well. Even now, Tagalog is a predominant language in our archipelago. That means that this heritage has lived for at least 1,000 years, despite our country being a country “officially” for just 100 years. So there’s like—whoah. There’s a huge retention of our history in our language, in our identities.

And the Pasig River is a place of tranquility, of myths, of beauty. Right now, she is, of course, in the middle of a metropolis, so she’s full of concrete, full of shanty towns and buildings. But before, she used to hold sandy banks with mangroves and forests, with animals like deer, water buffalo called carabao, horses, birds, and many kinds of fish that you can eat. Women and children bathed in the river—none of which you can see any more. For example, there are no more carabao on the road. There are no more horses.

But for a long time, people told stories about the water and worshipped in the massive stone formations in the middle of the river. There’s one stone that’s shaped like a crocodile: it’s said that once there was a Chinese traveler on a boat when a live crocodile attacked. And the traveler blurted out a prayer to a Catholic saint—even though he was Chinese—and that turned the crocodile into stone! And that stone can still be seen when the waters dry up or run low. And then there’s also another legend that says that a woman lived in a cave by the river, throwing parties and throwing treasures in the river.

According to multiple cultures in this area, protectors of the river come in many forms, but all are women. The water goddess takes different shapes: like a golden crocodile, or a woman wearing blue. (They say that the name Manila is made up of two different words: mai, a term for women, and then nila, a term for blue. So basically the city is named after a woman in blue, and she is the protector of the city or of the river.) And we also have mermaids in the river. Unlike the usual European stories, in which mermaids are sea-based, our countries have mermaids in the river. So our myths are all based on women protecting our waters.

All of those are tales, but the truth is much more beautiful. Because our people, from thousands and hundreds of years ago, were proud and rich, with their commerce reaching the rest of Asia. They became famous among the thousands of islands that we have in the neighborhood. And the kingdom’s Rajah—so like the chieftain of the kingdom—had a palace filled with gold, jewelry, woolen fabrics. During this time, Spain actually noticed that his palace was almost as big as those in Spain. And the palace’s bamboo fort had cannons that moved—compared to the Spanish ships, which had to turn the entire boat just to tilt their cannons! So we had the high-tech, even though we were using indigenous technology. We had bamboo, and used materials and wood from the forests, and we also had stonesmiths and even silversmiths. That’s why we had cannons, too!

Because of these riches, thanks to the river, the Spanish heard about this place from down South. And the stories they heard led them to travel up to the mouth of the river in Manila. They conquered it, and then called the rest of the islands Filipinas. And that’s why we have the country Philippines right now. Eventually development transformed the riverside, and it was beautifully adorned with palaces, gardens, villages, and churches, with people of various nationalities. Thanks to the river, and European influences, Manila became a global city before airplanes even existed. Unfortunately, given how they regularly used the river since there were no concrete roads for centuries, eventually, the river suffered from neglect.

But right after that came the river’s rescue. Recently there have been like 20 years of continuous effort, so now the river is cleaner. It smells nice, and there are fish and many birds —although the fish are not really—what do you call this—you cannot eat them yet. The water is still quite dirty, but at least it doesn’t smell so bad! Unfortunately, not everyone values the river deeply still. Maybe that’s why it’s not as rejuvenated as what we want. But all these wonderful stories that I told you earlier aren’t common knowledge to us. Our identity as Filipinos is connected to this river, but we still are not using the river in the metropolis as vibrantly as we used to.

So I really long for a renewed connection of the cities and the people with this river, because the heart of these cities and of our country is the Pasig River.

And that’s all. Thank you.

My story is just something that I’ve been thinking about. It’s about my patron god, Ganesha, who is half elephant, half… person/being. (He’s traditionally like half elephant, half man, but I’ve been seeing more and more depictions of him in feminine ways, so now I’m seeing them as half elephant, half non-binary person.)

And Ganesha used to visit my dreams. Since I was really, really young, I would see I would see them emerge around me; I would chit-chat with them. Ganesha is the god of poetry, academics, intellect. And I had always been very academically driven, so they were both assigned to me by people around me, because I was good at school, but I also felt very deeply connected to them.

And I’m from Sri Lanka, where there’s elephants everywhere. So I would also see them in the elephants, in the trees, in the air, in bananas, in things that elephants like to eat. So I really felt their presence for a very long time.

And then we got a little bit disconnected. I got very disillusioned by religion as a whole, and by faith as a whole for a long time. And only fairly recently did I reconnect with Ganesha—during the pandemic, maybe. So we’ve been strong since then, for the last couple years.

But more recently, I’ve also been feeling the presence of my mom’s patron goddess, who is Kali. And she has two sides. She actually has nine sides, but they can be simplified into two sides. One is this incredibly destructive force: she destroys in order to create. She is rage embodied. In most depictions of her, her skin is black or dark blue, her tongue is hanging out. She wears a necklace of skulls, and she has ten hands. In one, she’s holding the head of a man. And another’s got a plate to collect his blood. (Laughs) And in another hand she grips some kind of weapon. She’s a destroyer, and she’s the goddess of, like, endings. But endings in order to create.

And Kali’s other side is motherhood and creation and love and compassion. And my mom has felt very connected to her for a long time. Like if she’s in a Kali temple, her hands get really hot with healing energy, and whatever she asks Kali, she receives.

Lately, I’ve been feeling connected to Kali and trying to figure out, like, how do I reconcile her energy with Ganesha, who’s fairly calm and cool and relaxed, and very like rational. Whereas Kali definitely allows her emotions to lead her more, and is more in touch with her rage. So I’ve been trying to think about how, as a woman who was like an angry child and who was taught to suppress that anger, how can I embrace that rage now? So that’s been on my mind.

And then I remembered the story of when I was in Sri Lanka and I was on a safari ride in Yala National Park, and we had been driving for maybe an hour at this point. We didn’t really see any leopards, didn’t see any bears… we’re just seeing like dry shrubbery the whole time. And then out of nowhere we see this lone, adolescent female elephant.

We see her, she sees us, and then she runs across the road. And I can see that she’s warning the herd behind her. And before we descended on her, she was playing and just like hanging out. And then she sees us, she runs to her herd, and she starts bluff charging. She was running her foot against the soil like she was preparing for a sprint—this was her way of threatening us, saying, “If you come closer, I will charge at you.”

And she looked very young… (the tracker that was with us was able to read elephants’ age and stuff based on prints on their body, and was saying, “She’s really young. She’s probably not even the mother. She’s maybe like the older sister or something in this herd.”) But she was really taking responsibility this time, and bluff charging. And then after we left, she stopped charging and, you know, herded her herd away (Laughs).

So that story has been helping me reconcile those two things, you know? Sometimes the elephant has to embody Kali, and sometimes Ganesha has to embody Kali, too. And there are probably moments when Kali has to embody Ganesha.

Those are some things that have been on my mind that have been helping me connect to my environment, my ancestors, my mom, my nature, and myself.

In Qatar we have very interesting climates. Two years ago, maybe three years ago, we had a really bad flood in October, and that is super uncommon for us. Like the rain season doesn’t usually start then, and also the drainage system wasn’t prepared because it wasn’t time for the rain yet. And so there was a really really bad flood in the country.

And then this year, in 2022, we have this running joke of four seasons in one day, because literally it can be sunny in the morning, dusty in the afternoon, raining, and then windy. We can experience so many kinds of seasons in a day, and we’ve been… blessed—always blessed—but we’ve received the gift this year of sandstorms.

Like, we always have sandstorms, but this year was different because they came out of place in random months. It’s not anything consistent. And they were really more aggressive than usual. I was born and raised here, I’m almost 23, so we’ve had sandstorms our entire lives, but this year is different.

I can tell that it’s different. It’s more aggressive. It’s the way it’s affecting us, like the allergies and the symptoms you feel have changed, and the visibility driving to work… It was never this bad. It was never—like it just feels like It’s getting worse.

And at the same time, everything stays normal. We still go to work. Nothing, nothing changes. We still have to drive. We still like—we obviously just minimize walking outside (and here we don’t walk a lot outside in general, because it’s usually really hot except in the winter months.) But yeah. That’s kind of what I was thinking of.

[Second voice: I have never experienced a sandstorm. What does it smell like?]

It smells like dust.
Like pure dust.
Like sand.
You can’t breathe, and ana, I have allergies. So the pressure in the sinus and in the head is just constant, because it seeps through the windows. We get to a point where we also put wet towels under the doors to block the—because otherwise there’s gonna be a new layer of sand in the house every day.

It’s interesting. I don’t recommend it, but if you’re curious, you’re more than welcome to come experience it. Although honestly, haram, it doesn’t happen that often. It’s just the timings this year… very random.

[Second voice: What color is the sand?]

Hold on. let me try to find… (scrolling through photos on her phone) It’s like the entire sky becomes like beige…

(Finding a photo)

So you can see this is all the cloud, it’s all like sand coming at the city.

This is the city. This is my way to work.
(Okay, I’m trying to get no reflection. I apologize.)
It’s just there’s… nothing. Normally you see buildings.

There’s no buildings.
It’s like a sandstorm.

[Second voice: Wow. I also love that you called it a gift.]

I don’t wanna say—
Ya’ani—
Everything’s a blessing in one way or another, whether we recognize it or not.

I have a story about a hurricane.

So last year, I was working on a play at the end of August in Boston, and I had actually planned to take a weekend off and go to the beach. I had even invited some people, including my partner and his family, to travel up from New York and go with us.

And then it was announced that a tropical storm was strengthening in the Atlantic Ocean, and it was turning into what was looking like the first hurricane to make landfall in Boston in 30 years. The news said that the storm was headed straight for the city.

It had already been a wild period in terms of climate. I had recently watched my family in Texas deal with power outages due to spring ice storms, and the previous autumn, smoke from wildfires on the West Coast had turned the sky above Boston—which is like 3,000 miles away—completely orange. And the week prior to this incoming hurricane, there had been both tornadoes and hail in the area—both pretty unusual in New England.

When I was a kid, my family lived in another part of the country where there were often tornadoes, so I felt like I understood the need to take serious warnings seriously—to be prepared. And there was the mayor of Boston on TV, telling everyone in the city to put together a supply kit, including a flashlight, extra batteries, nonperishable foods, copies of identification papers. It was very serious. And it felt just like the stories I had watched unfold on TV over and over again in Florida and Texas, which are dealing with these types of storms more and more often.

So as the mayor was issuing these warnings, I was arguing a little bit with my friends about how much we needed to prepare. Because I think of myself as being very serious about climate. And I told my friends, “We have to take this warning seriously and get ready, because if we don’t, it will be too late.” And they thought I was exaggerating. They were like, “It’s gonna be fine.”

So I wound up going to the store alone. I put on all of my rain gear and went out into the city, and I bought a battery-operated lantern, and a bunch of toilet paper (because I remembered how crazy everyone had been about toilet paper at the start of the pandemic). And I looked for a radio, but I couldn’t find one. It was too late.

Then I was hauling all this stuff back home, and I noticed that the city had a really weird atmosphere. It was kind of gray and still, not raining yet, and there were a few other people like me, running around getting supplies like the mayor had told us to. And then there were some other people like having brunch on the sidewalk with like, you know, mimosas and coffee and avocado toast and whatever.

And that discrepancy was maybe my first indicator that something was kind of off. An hour or two later, just when the storm was supposed to begin, it was announced that a powerful wind had blown the storm off course at the last minute, out to sea, and it was not going to hit us at all. It never came. Long story short, the press called it a “nothingburger.” The sun was shining. We could have gone to the beach.

And I felt lucky that we hadn’t been hit, but I also felt grumpy. I felt sort of crazy, because I had been the one insisting that this was real—that the global problem was finally turning into something local that I could respond to in a tangible way, in a way that I couldn’t prepare for the crises that I was watching happen from afar in other parts of the globe or the country. I felt like a climate change denier’s most stereotypical image of an oversensitive liberal: there I was, standing under a sunny sky in a raincoat, holding toilet paper and a battery-operated lantern, making a fuss about an emergency that never came.

I think about this story all the time, because it feels to me like a test, and I don’t know if I passed or not.

But I do still have the lamp I bought that day, and I know exactly where it is, just in case there’s a next time. Just in case I need to be ready.

I was born and raised by parents who were Maths and Science teachers, and I am from a religious background. So when I say religious, I mean my parents are religious. Me and my sisters, we are like six, then we also stay with our cousins, so that makes nine. And all of us used to go together to church with my mom and dad.

I was quite attracted to the activities within the church, although I didn’t see the meaning of going to church to pray. I was into the music. It’s a catholic church, mixed with the culture around—which is music. So that got me into the dancing, the activities in the church, and the communal actions they had. I was very much attracted to that, and I used to go to the church on Friday spend the night and go back on Sunday evening… Because I know Monday to Friday I had to go to school.

That’s when I actually developed an interest in activities related to climate. Though I didn’t know the climate issue by then, we were managing tree seedlings and environmental education issues—but in my mind, I was just being engaged in activities connected with the church! When I was like 12 years old, I started going to talks, workshops that were also coordinated by the church, but they would talk about environmental issues, youth engagement issues… and then there was this one time…

(I wasn’t that courageous then, apart from the dancing, because no one was really looking at my dancing style, so I didn’t care about that. But my courage just in talking in front of people wasn’t there yet.)

…But at this age of 12, I went to talk to these people about tree seedlings and the nurseries that we were doing in church, and they told me that I was more ambitious… and then they started sponsoring my education. That was in primary school, and they also nurtured me in the environmental space and later, after Form 4, they called me to a workshop in Nairobi and told me they will continue sponsoring my education into a college of my choice, and I went to study Agriculture.

After that, I got out and started an initiative called Shapers… We would make kitchen gardens (using polyethene) in the slums in Nairobi for people that don’t have good housing or those that do not have spaces within their compounds. So, we did that for some months, but then we had a fallout, so everyone went ahead to tackle their own problems.

And then, um, another thing happened. I was going to actually visit my boyfriend. He was staying in a different nearby county called Thika, so I was going from Nairobi to Thika. So, uh, I got the shock of my life then [laughs]. Because when I went into his house, I found a picture of another lady wearing a graduation gown. And so I was very disappointed.

And I was like, “Ah, the initiative Shapers has fallen, my relationship has fallen, now it’s better if I go back home.” [Laughs] But I also had like… thoughts that I might be pregnant. Because we had been doing very silly things, so that made me also not want to go back home. It would be quite a shame—”you’re from the village, you go to Nairobi, you go back home pregnant, and you have not achieved anything!” So it will be quite a shame.

So I stayed in Nairobi for quite some time and came up with other ideas. That’s when I started The Polly Foundation. It started from the initial idea of Shapers, but I integrated it into a big spectrum of ecosystem restorations, where I would teach people basically about organic farming. I would tell them about tree planting in green spaces in town and also raise awareness on climate issues, and also waste management. (Because we were staying in slums—waste management was an issue).

So (laughing) that’s how I started my climate action activities. Yeah.

Hello. Okay. So I’m gonna tell you a story about my first love.

So, when I was seven years old, I remember just being extremely fascinated by this boy in my class. And I didn’t know that it was love, or falling in love at that time—I just remember being extremely fascinated by his green eyes, and his skin, and his hair, and everything about him.

So one day I decided that I wanted to give him something. I don’t know why. I just had the impulse to give him something, something precious.

So I went home, and I looked in my room, and I thought, “What is the most precious thing that I can give him?” And I ended up with this red plastic jewelry. That, for some reason, was the most important thing I owned at that time. And I took it back to school the day after. I had it in my bag, and I decided that I wanted to give it to him in the first break, and so I did.

I remember standing in the window in the classroom, looking down into the yard, and he was playing soccer with the rest of the boys in the class. I was gathering the courage to go down there, and I went down there, and I realized, “Okay, I have to stop him from playing soccer.”

So I just eventually yelled his name, and he came over to me like I was a stranger. I don’t think we had ever spoken to each other before that moment, actually, and I just showed him the jewelry, and I asked, “Do you want this?” And he looked at the jewelry, and then he looked at me, and he was like, “No, thank you.” And he went back to playing soccer. And then yeah, that that was it.

Actually, so the reason why I think I’m telling this story is, or the thing I think is interesting in this story is—I didn’t know what it was at the time. I was just acting on impulses. It’s only now, when I’m an adult, that I can see that it was my first love, and it was my first experience with being let down by love.

And I think that whenever I try to get my head around this existential question about climate change, I end up in a very concrete story, because it’s like reality is too complex in some way. And I—I really don’t want to rationalize too much about this story in this context.

But I think that if there was just one thing that I could take from this story, it is that it leaves me with the feeling that sometimes it’s so much easier to understand something when it’s left behind. When you look back at it. When it’s not there. It’s only now that I understand that this was about my first love.

Yeah. I don’t know.