A Letter to Greta.
Dear Greta Thunberg,
I am so inspired by your ability to raise your voice in tacking the global and very important issue of climate change.
I also very much admire your decision to travel everywhere by train.
I watched with keen interest as you began skipping school and spent weeks outside the Swedish Parliament with a meaningful protesting sign.
I work in London near Westminster and for the first time ever I experienced what would be a walkout which would see students from all over the world join a global day of school strikes on 15 March 2019.
It was wonderful to see that your strike inspired thousands of students from from Germany, Japan, the UK, Australia and many more to join your #FridaysforFuture demonstrations.
I also really admired the fact that you were always accompanied by your dad, who not only took you seriously but also shared your passion and approach to achieving it.
However, in my humble opinion, I feel that you and the thousands who joined you do not represent the real plight of millions of children in today’s world. Especially those in third world countries and to be specific, in Sub-Saharan Africa.
They will only be seen in the streets helping their parents trade goods to feed them or to find ways to fend for themselves.
According to Unicef 63 million children of primary school age (typically aged 6–11 years) are not in school
- 61 million adolescents of lower secondary school (typically aged 12–14) are not in school
- Adolescents of upper secondary school age, from 15–17 years, make up the largest group of those out of school. About 139 million (53 per cent of the total) are not in school
- More than one half of all out-of-school children are in sub-Saharan Africa
- 50 per cent of children who are out of school are girls
- Nearly 1 in 4 of out-of-school children live in crises-affected countries
These children do not have this same privilege of clarity of vision because the first thing they think of when they wake up may be a combination of the following;
💧A lack of running water and sanitation facilities
🍽A lack of food
🛣 The absence of adequate transportation to travel to school
🔬A lack of adequate healthcare facilities.
I do hope that there will come a time when activism could be a real job for many of them and I hope that at such a time they too will be able to spend weeks outside of the offices of those who have been democratically elected to serve them raising their voices and demanding better services such as education and healthcare.
I do also now wish that I had used my time as a 16 year old more wisely. The problem is even at that age it was clear that any attempt would have been immediately stopped by my parents.
I feel its not too late though but the issue is that many of these these countries have faced years struggling with the long term effects of economic crises, wars and depletion of education funds.
And now Education no longer seems to be at the forefront of global priorities…
The world is listening to you and seems willing to devote more time and resources to fighting global warming.
So for now the number of children out of school will continue to stagnate and the quality of schools in Sub-Saharan Africa will continue to decline but I will sleep tonight knowing that I have finally found the courage to express the thoughts I have had for a while.
Yours Sincerely
Betty
