“Since our leaders are behaving like children, we will have to take the responsibility they should have taken long ago.” – Greta Thunberg
Climate change is real and it’s happening. It’s a crisis that our planet is facing and it’s getting much worse as the years are going by. It is said by BBC that we have 18 months to save our planet. In one of our service sessions, we watched a video which was a speech from Greta Thunberg that sparked some conversations in our group. Greta Thunberg, as you may know, is a 16-year-old environmental activist who is inspiring the world to wake up and do something about climate change. Fridays for Future is a movement created by Greta Thunberg calling people to gather and do school strikes for climate every Friday. We the reef keepers are an environmental group and we wanted to do something to raise awareness about this movement.
Made by Alexandra Parr
I had no idea about this movement until our service group showed us the website and talked about it for a while. We wanted to do the same and have a climate strike in our school to show solidarity with this movement. So, as a group, we started to plan this event. One of the first things that we discussed was how are we going to carry this strike? We wanted to do the strike outside our school campus but there’s currently security issues in Sri Lanka so it was unsafe. So, we decided to do the strike in our auditorium. After, deciding on a location we focussed on what we wanted to do with the time in the auditorium. We had ideas about doing skits and various other things but decided to stick to a presentation to inform people about this issue. This presentation was carried out by all the service leaders in Secondary. The presentation included things like an introduction about the movement, watching a speech given by Greta Thunberg and writing a small letter to the government to show our concerns about climate change. The assembly concluded by informing the secondary students to sign the pledge.
Students in the back gate protesting
Photo Credits: Shivani Dayal