It has been a week of mixed emotions. At the beginning of the week I was feeling pumped, albeit tired from this single working mum business but pumped none the less. I was working with the environmental club at school to participate with the Global Climate Strike and I have to say the energy generated by the children in the club was contagious. This student led environmental club took this opportunity to voice their opinions about how adult decisions are impacting on their future, their livelihoods and their families here in Samoa and it was amazing. We had the press there, it was live streamed on an online Samoan news site and was even contacted by a film maker in Quebec to feature footage of the protest in a movie he is making. Then, then a White supremacist terrorist walks into a Mosque in Christchurch and massacres 50 innocent people. Many of the teachers I work with are New Zealanders or have family living in New Zealand. I could feel the shock-waves reverberating as colleagues huddled together in quiet whispers showing images to each other on their phones about what was unfolding 3,269km away. To be so far away and yet so connected in the now when you know your mothers, fathers, children and extended family are so close to the atrocity taking place, it was hard to know what to say. So I said nothing, not because I didn't feel outrage, not because I didn't feel an utter disgust at the racist fall out and vile Islamophobic rhetoric spewed forth from Fraser Anning and his brain dead followers, but because I felt lost and confused. There I was swimming in a sea of positive pro-active energy generated by children as young as 4 chanting "save our Island" protesting for their future and later that afternoon I was reading news headlines about a terrorist attack in Christchurch.
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February 2021
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