( I wrote this short article sometime ago for my younger brother, about 11 years old that time, who was asked to deliver a short speech in class regarding ‘Making a Difference’. He was the only Asian student in their school. )
photo taken at www.theatlantic.com
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When I was young, a lot younger than I am today, I dreamed of waking up one morning and seeing snow on my windowpane. I imagined the cool wind sipping through the leaks on my window and hover around my tender body. What a feeling! – but this feeling was only satisfied by the chilly, meat-smelling air from our family’s old, green refrigerator.
I come from a country where snow is just a part of an innocent child’s fantasy; a country where everyday the sun plays tug-of-war with the rain; a country where typhoons visit more often than they used to be; a country where children play in the streets that are sometimes filled with flood. I come from the country they called “Pearl of the Orient Seas”, the county I called the Philippines!
My country, and some other neighboring Asian countries, has suffered despicable acts of typhoons. It left my countrymen seeing their past and future being thrown away by the raging wind and swept away by the gushing flood.
My mind wonders,”What have they done? Why did they experience such a disaster?” These questions stayed in my mind until I remembered something. My brother once told me, ‘This Earth is like a giant spaceship but has no program for self-destruction’.
Now, I’ve come up to the right question, “What have we done?” And I mean “us” – humankind.
Everytime we use our heaters, aerosols, refrigerators, appliances and some other electronic devices, they slowly poison the atmosphere and we indirectly contribute to the birth of new typhoons that will surely damage the lives, especially, of the youth like us.
Young as we are, we may not be enough to change the world around us. But we have our voices, voices that we can use to our mums and dads, brothers and sisters. We can always be a reminder to them, to be warned and to change. And this still small voices that we have, might as well reverse this worsening world we’re living in.
We can make a difference!
And I think, making this difference is far better than just seeing snow on my windowpane.