Climate Change, it feels like it’s definitely become another buzz word to throw around these days. Even I became really apathetic about it all: recycle this, take the bottle top off this… it all just seemed like too much effort. But after the two weeks I spent in Kenya my perspective definitely did a 360.

As part of my year internship programme with Ctrl.Alt.Shift I got to spend two weeks in a developing country. Kenya’s main resource and income for many families is farming, but with the drastic change in climate they have not received anywhere near enough rain to water their crops. This means a country starving, 10 million out of 35 million Kenyan citizens go hungry everyday. So when I got the good news that I’d be going to the COP 15 for the full two weeks of negotiations, you could say I was more than simply excited.

As it goes, admin, work (and all those crappy things that suddenly crop up) got me distracted, and while I ran down Sloane St, getting soaking wet, to my visa appointment at the Danish Embassy (I’m South African and as it goes, anyone from Africa needs to go through ‘polite discrimination’ to travel EU countries, but that’s a topic for a different day!) I was struggling to see the point of it all…

But when I got back into the office I had something sitting in my inbox, an email from Cosmos one of the field workers for UCCS, who we spent some time with visiting community groups in Kitui, he told me about how the little rain we experienced while in Kenya had stopped and how for the last few weeks he has been doing intense hunger relief work. Then he said something that makes getting soaking wet, travelling on a coach for two days, and protesting in below zero temperatures all worthwhile, “You have been given the chance to share our stories and challenge world leaders for us, so please go there and make sure change is made.”

Words: Yumna Martin