40-Hour Challenge Leaders Day

In South East Asia is a little country called Timor-Leste. Here, a young girl named Pasquela lives at home with her parents and three younger siblings. Sounds like a normal life, right? However, Pasquela has to live in harsh conditions on a day-to-day basis; rain that becomes knee-high floods washes out her rice crops, leaving her with no income that makes her and her siblings drop out of school; a tremendous amount of heat is what dried up her home making it hard to grow new crops. Now it’s a daily struggle to put food on the table, their only help is from their neighbours. Her father had to find a job to support them, so now he makes money by picking up heavy rocks and sand. Pasquela feels sad because he’s too old to be working, and they don't have an older brother to help him.

This is all because of climate change. While people take actions that make Pasquela’s life hard, Timor-Leste has only produced 0.003% of Global Carbon. Pasquela, the girl who struggles to find food to nourish herself and her family, is exactly like the other 50% of kids who are struggling to feed themselves properly.

At this leadership day, we learnt about Climate change, and how our actions impact it. The 40-hour challenge representatives were trying to raise awareness about the planet and to develop young leaders, they told stories, played games and taught us about the different ways to campaign the 40-hour challenge. They also had a special guest speaker who told us about her inspiring story and how she had to test her limits, scare herself, and take risks.

During the day there were lots of fun activities, for example, there was a wheel and you only had one 16th chance of landing in the 16th spot to get a free t-shirt, all the girls had a go at lunchtime, Nela and Lila got it first try, then Mia and Charlotte got it next and it was only Ari and Emma left. At this point, we had circled the line about 5 times and the person running it felt bad so she may or may not have stopped it on the 16th piece so we could all get t-shirts! Overall it was a very exciting and productive day, all the girls had fun and would love to go back. It was a great leadership experience and they now will be campaigning the 40-hour famine throughout the school and running it!

Special thanks to Christian Jones who chaperoned us on the day.

The 40-hour challenge is being held on 21st-23rd June. Sign-up will be happening soon, so keep an eye out on Cactus and Hail!

“I ask New Zealand to fight against climate change”- Pasquela