Climate change. All change.
We’ve heard about the huge problems children are facing in areas of water scarcity; the long walks to collect dirty water, waterborne diseases, missed schooling… but there’s another side to the climate change coin. In some communities too much water, caused by rising sea levels is threatening livelihoods, homes – and whole towns.
Here, World Vision’s Kirsten Nainoca shares the experience of her home nation, Fiji.
Imagine having to leave your home. Having to start again. Through no choice of your own.
Picture a boy on an idyllic island. We’ll name him Tomasi. He stands with his family, looking back at their home. Once full of life, filled with pictures of his great-grandparents and the smell of his mother’s cooking, it’s now just an empty wooden house with nothing but memories of the past.
‘Remember this, one last time,’ he tells himself as they walk past the plantation his father, grandfather and great grandfather worked on for generations, the school he and his siblings attended and the fields he would play rugby on with his friends – all now empty, lifeless, almost unrecognisable.
Tomasi is not a boy I know – he is many people. Too many of my friends and family have lived that scene – leaving the places they grew-up or raised their families to escape the rising tides and start again.