#GlobalClimateStrike

Yesterday was the global strike for the climate and I knew I wanted to be there. To stand in solidarity with those who would gather here in this place, and in so many other places across the planet. I don't know whether any of this is going to make any difference. I worry that we are too wedded to our greed and privilege to really take the steps needed to avert the catastrophe. I still want to be able to believe that I tried.

Friday is a day I teach at the Sanctuary, though, so it didn't really feel appropriate to strike from teaching refugee kids for whom I am fighting for the right to an education! My plan was to teach my class, and then head down to join the Birmingham protest.

Until I realised that this was a youth-lead strike, and my students might have better reasons than most for understanding the issues and wanting a better future. So I wrote a risk assessment, filled bottles of water (reusable ones, obviously) and rapidly replanned my lesson, to spend the first half of it talking about climate change and the global climate strikes, and the second half joining the climate procession with my little class of teenagers and nearly teenagers.

They did need to be given some vocabulary to know what it was about. The word climate was new to most of them. The word protest, likewise.

But the concepts of both were deeply familiar.

Despite hesitant English they could speak about experiences of protest, both peaceful and violent. And while they might need me to supply the words, they didn't me to explain the impact of climate change: for them it is not some future possibility, but a current reality; summed up for me in this contribution to the conversation "My dad is a farmer in Sudan. There is not enough rain any more."

And so we set off. To play our part. To stand together with others who care.

For these kids, climate change is a matter of life and death in a very real sense. Taking part with them made it all the more meaningful for me. It was a privilege to march alongside them.