Speaker: Kettie Pendame, Chiradzulu, Malawi
How (and why) are you taking action on climate change solutions in, for, and with your community?
Kettie Pendame: My name is Kate Pendame. I am from Malawi based in Chiradzulu District. I'm going to be responding the question to why and how am I taking climate change solutions in my community or as an individual. So, in my community, we set up practices that are going to be sustainable to different villages because we were once hit with the cyclone Freddie. So we've been giving people different resources on how they can manage and build resilient homes and at the same time to use reusable energy and plant trees because last time most houses were washed away because of the water that was coming directly from the mountains. So it like had no, it was coming with a higher pressure. So most houses were washed away. So as a solution, we embarked a journey of sensitizing the communities on the effects of not taking care of the forest that they have, the effect of overpopulation as well because that is one of the fact that that is forcing the people to end up settling in areas prone to climate change effects, I mean risk or impacts. So that is one of the things or part of the things that we've been doing to mitigate the risks that come before, after and during climate change impacts.
Who or what inspires/inspired you to care about climate change and climate solutions?
Kettie Pendame: What inspires me a lot is one time when we were in class learning about sustainable development, we um focused much on the environmental aspect of life because we need to balance the three pillars of sustainability, which is environmental, economic and political. So we were focusing much on the environmental side because climate change is a thing that is affecting everyone at the global scale. So um one time that we did the victims of victims of unsustainability, it happened that human beings are the major victims. I mean, human beings are the major I would say agents to ruining sustainability because most people do not take care of the ecology. Most people do not take care of the environment because they do not believe in sustainability and do not understand how to like protect the resources that we have now for the benefit of the future generation. So when I looked at this, I was really inspired a lot because coming from the past, how things used to be happening in especially developed countries, they would just um emit those large gasses without thinking about the benefits of, without thinking about the commons, you know, because I feel like everything that they do at the end of the day, they affect developing countries. Like how now we have, we are experiencing global warming and we're no longer experiencing rain in the part and that is always like that each and every year. So this is going to affect sustainability. So I feel like as an advocate I would work and this inspires me. It will help me work on helping out the victims of unsustainability, which is the human beings because we do not bring about part and parcel to sustainability because we are always even going to the boundaries. We forget that the ecology as well, like when it comes to trees, when it comes to even the little animals that we cannot see with our own eyes, they also need to have their own space to operate on. So this is one of the things that really inspires me a lot to focus on climate change.
