I grew up in the city called Gabes, in South Tunisia, on a gulf of the Mediterranean. Since I was young, I have been that curious girl in the family who always wants to learn and explore. I felt a pleasure in learning new subjects, new languages. I always had my head inside a book. I’ve also always felt a special connection to nature. I grew up in my grandma’s house, surrounded by family, and we would all go to harvest olives together and make our own olive oil, and we went often to the beach. I have so many memories of being in nature with my family.

I also happen to be Imazighen—the indigenous people of North Africa. I didn’t grow up in Matmata, the Imazighen village in the Gabes region, but my grandpa did. He moved to the city, so that’s where I grew up. I’ve always been surrounded by the culture, but I grew up with this desire to learn more about my identity and my community. I grew up seeing my grandma weaving palm-tree leaves into bags and traditional clothing. I don’t know if you’ve been to Tunisia, but if you have, you’ve probably seen the woven hats worn during special occasions.

I think everyone can look back on their life and find a moment where you think, “Yeah. That happened for a reason.” For me, when I was in ninth grade, I had an English teacher, and I was her favorite student. One day, she was teaching us about climate change. (In Tunisia, we learn about climate change in ninth grade, and it’s not a science subject. It’s an “English” subject.) And I got furious when I saw that we were reading a report from 2001. I raised my hand, and I asked, “Why are we reading a report that’s eight years old when there are new numbers each year? And why are we learning about this global issue only as an English subject? It’s really frustrating!”

And that English teacher, she knew that I had something. After class, she called me, and she said, “Manar, I know exactly how you feel. Unfortunately, in our education system, there are a lot of things that should be changed. We teachers are not satisfied with the resources we have to give to students.” And she told me, “People like you, who raise their hands, are here to make that change.” She told me that there was an environmental club at the school, and she said that if I worked with them, I might find a community of people who could understand me.

So I said OK, and I got into the club. And I found the community that I wanted. I felt heard. One time, we had a movie screening of Before the Flood, with Leonardo DiCaprio. And after watching that movie, we tried to brainstorm how we could take that knowledge into real action, local action, even if it’s small. And we chose plastic pollution specifically. We thought that if we could treat this problem, or even just educate our local community about it, we could make an impact. And suddenly, I remembered the bags made of palm tree leaves that I grew up watching my grandma make. We thought, “This could be the solution. This is inspired by our tradition. It’s part of our identity. Why are we even using plastic bags when we have this alternative?” So we used those traditional bags as a way to make a contribution in our community and educate them about the global crisis.

And my action didn’t stop there, because I understand that to tackle the global crisis, we need a bigger change, change in the whole system that depends on fossil fuels. Our project got selected for a national award, and that led to opportunities for me to travel and learn more about climate science. And I knew: “This is my purpose. This is what I want to do for the rest of my life. I want to bring this knowledge home.”

So I went back, and I started to work on local mobilization. Influenced by Greta Thunberg, I started skipping school every Friday and traveling alone to Tunis, the capital. I was 17 years old. My dad would wake up at three in the morning to drop me at the station, so I could take the five-hour journey by van to attend a climate march and then go back the same day, because my parents would go crazy if I slept in the capital! I was just a small girl, holding her poster inside the van. But I felt fulfilled. I had actually made my voice heard. I found a community of people organizing marches, and I met up with Youth for Climate Tunisia. I went on to university, and I founded a youth-led organization called EcoWave.

So the bags were just the beginning. Little did I know, when I joined that club in ninth grade, that I would soon be leading a team of youth changemakers around the country. Little did I know that within a few years, I would be standing at the United Nations headquarters in New York and at other high-level international conferences, representing the voice of my community. Being able to be in those spaces, talking about youth, especially in the Middle East/North Africa region, is so important. We’re not well represented. So just being there, being a voice, gives me hope—even if we’re still lacking a lot of things that should really be addressed.

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.