Last month, the month of Earth Day, I was invited to Dubai International Academy to deliver an Eco Talk to year 4 students. Without thinking I just said yes, as I believe students or younger generation are best recipients of talk on this topic. These kids are born in an age of climate change, so they are not skeptical about it. They have easily understood the need for efforts to be taken to stop climate change and accepted it as part of life. These generations don’t need any convincing, they just are more Eco-friendly than us naturally. They are eager to learn more and do more.
While preparing an interactive presentation, I didn’t have an exact idea on how much these kids might be aware of sustainable living. But when I started talking to them I was pleasantly surprised to see their level of Eco-awareness. Definitely, credit goes to their school teachers and parents, but having such a brilliance audience was a delight to me. Since years in my professional life, I have been talking about sustainability to top management, engineers, stakeholders, developers, contractors working on sustainable development projects but I confess, I never had an audience as receptive and as engaging! If any of you have doubt on how much a kid in 4th grade can understand and grasp things about sustainable living, just ask me now.
It was an overdose of cuteness that morning! Imagine when you start your talk with a good morning and get a response from around 120 students ‘Good Morning Miss Amruta’ in unison! Their involvement in the talk was so much that our lecture time exceeded to almost double, but these well-behaved kids not just sat through it till the end but asked me brilliant questions, where I had to think before answering. I was delighted to see how much they knew about UAE’s environment! While sharing my experience of living sustainably in UAE, I introduced them to many aspects of sustainability including sustainable food, sustainable fashion, and techniques for recycling and reusing.
At the end of the talk, kids gifted me a handmade thank you card, which sits on my desk now. Spreading awareness about sustainable living is my passion and I am always happy to talk to students and extend my support to educational institutes because the satisfaction I get after making anyone more Eco-aware is difficult to describe. This was one of those best experiences of my sustainability blogger-educator life!
