Solito2Solidarity presents
The People’s COP27: Voices from the Front Lines of Climate Change
A year ago we joined together on Zoom for the People’s COP26 “Voices from the Front Lines of Climate Change.” Across ten time zones, we asked how did you experience nature as children? What has changed in the environment? How has climate change informed you work as activists and defenders of the earth? Many things have happened since last November — floods in South Asia; wars in Ukraine & Tigray; food shortages; fossil fuel energy spikes. But we resist “doom and gloom” despair and passivity in favor of concrete examples of resilience, adaptation and positive climate action. We believe in the transformative energy of sharing stories of courage, adaptation, resilience. Our theme is From Solito (aloneness, isolation, fear) to Solidarity (joining together to survive, adapt and thrive.)
How has climate change affected you and your region in the last year? Tell us a story that takes us to your world. What resources could compensate your region’s loss and damage and promote regeneration?
We’re inviting each of you to a new People’s COP27, at the end of the UN conference on climate in Egypt. This year Steven and Jonathan will be hosting a two-hour session on November 20, 2022 from 10 am to 12 noon (California time), with simultaneous Zoom sessions in your time zone. Simply, at the same time as last year. Ibrahim Tchan is participating in COP27 and will be on the scene in Egypt to wrap up the event.
We are going to preview an amazing music video: “Solito to Solidarity” co-produced by S2S and Ibrahim Tchan, who you’ll remember playing the guitar from Glasgow. With lyrics created by Steven and Jonathan, original music by Ibrahim and his band was recorded and filmed in Benin, West Africa.
Join the reunion! Bring your stories, your personal challenges and contributions. We can change the Emotion Climate of Fear and Aggressiveness to a Community of Compassion and Positive Action.
This global people-to-people forum will take place on Zoom, so tune in from wherever you are at your local time zone!
Sunday November 20, 2022
10am in Santa Cruz, California
12pm in Yucatán, Mexico
8pm in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt
9pm in Dire Dawa, Ethiopia
12am in Chittagong, Bangladesh
Zoom Link: https://ccsf-edu.zoom.us/j/84904097917
Facebook Event: https://fb.me/e/3b9YCEVAn
Participants will include:
Ibrahim Tchan is a Beninese jurist specializing in cultural heritage and the Executive Director of the Corps des Volontaires Béninois (Corps of Benin Volunteers). He is also Director and Co-Founder of the Tata Somba Ecomuseum, the first ecological museum in West Africa. After Koutammakou, Land of the Batammariba, was included on the 2020 World Monuments Watch, he began coordinating the Koutammakou Cultural Landscape Preservation Project, Benin and Togo with his organization, Corps des Volontaires Béninois, with the financial support of the World Monuments Fund. Also a member of the Climate Heritage Network (CHN), he is CHN Africa Region Representative within the Climate Heritage Network-GlobalABC / Green Solutions Award Engagement Task Team. Activist and musician, Ibrahim Tchan is particularly active in projects involving the participation of local communities in the management and animation of world heritage, he designed the ConP’Art (Knowing my world heritage) didactic tool dedicated to educating children (10 and 13 years old) on African world heritage through the character of Comic Strip called Tory, the Little Ecocitoyen.
Lipi Rahman is one of the founders who directly involved in the evolving of Badabon Sangho. She has been supporting organisation with money, labour and suggestion. She worked as Executive Director of Badabon Sangho since its inception on volunteering basis. Currently she is acting as Executive Director and General Secretary of Executive Committee. She worked with non-profit development sector for last 20 years with different capacities. She born and brought up in educated Muslim family. She did masters in Political Science from University of Dhaka. She has strong passion and commitment for the vulnerable women. She is single lady, spending most of the time for organisation wellbeing.
Pedro Uc Be is a poet, teacher, and defender of the Maya land in Yucatan, Mexico. He is a member of Múuch ‘Xíinbal, Assembly of Defenders of the Maya Territory, an organization that aims to defend its territory from the dispossession applied by mega-companies of renewable energy in the Yucatan Peninsula. Pedro is currently a professor at the School of Literary Creation of the State Center of Fine Arts (CEBA), a campus where he also studied. He also graduated as a theologian from the San Pablo Presbyterian Theological Seminary in 1985 in the city of Mérida. He has a degree in Secondary Education in the area of Social Sciences from the Escuela Normal Superior de Campeche. He was a professor of Philosophy and History since 1993 in the city of Ticul, Yucatán at the José Dolores Rodríguez Tamayo Educational Center.
Anahí Haizel De la Cruz Martín is a Maya photographer. She was born in Ticul, Yucatán, on July 25, 1993. She has shown her work in various exhibitions including the collective exhibition The Memories of the Mayan Territory at the Museo Maya Santa Cruz Xbáalam Naj in Felipe Carrillo Puerto, Quintana Roo, Mexico. She was a fellow of the Young Creators 2019-2020 program of the Fund for Culture and the Arts (FONCA) in the Visual Arts Photography Area. She has published her photographs in the magazines La Ojarasca, Revista Sinfín, in the Italian magazine La Macchina Sognante, as well as in the Mexico News Daily newspaper and the Diario de Yucatán. Haizel accompanies and documents processes of struggle for the vindication of the Mayan language and culture as a member of the Assembly of Defenders of the Maya Múuch ’Xíinbal Territory. She has shared his photographs on Facebook and on her blog for the outreach of the communities.
Seifu Assegid works for Save the Children as a Roving Humanitarian Communication Coordinator. Seifu’s photographs and stories have appeared in popular television programs, newspapers, and magazines including the UK Daily Telegraph, Aljazeera TV, and media outlets in Australia and elsewhere. He has been voice to the voiceless by sharing their stories for donors and members of Save the Children. His work mainly focuses on people affected by climate change, and is informed by his personal experiences as a child and adult.
Pascal Broca was born in Tunisia and grew up in southwestern France near Bordeaux. As a child his best memories are of a big oak tree, walnut and apple orchards at his grandparents home near the small town of Royan on the Atlantic Coast. He went to college in Nancy to study engineering and spent a year studying in Sweden. With degrees in computer science and electrical engineering he went to work in Germany for Hewlett Packard and came to the US for a project but fell in love the redwood forests in the Santa Cruz mountains of California. At age thirty-nine, his car was struck from the rear and he suffered traumatic brain injury. Hospitalized in a cell-like hospital room in France, he felt so much joy when he came home to hug the trees. He moved back to the Santa Cruz mountains, where he owns a home surrounded by ten acres of redwoods. One night he was awakened by a tsunami like wind followed by hundreds of lightning strikes in all directions. As a volunteer firefighter, he packed his bag and went to the Bonny Doon fire station. But the wildfire could not be contained, and after a few days the fire crews left the scene. Alone, with a water hose, chain saw, he fought the fires and saved many homes in his neighborhood.
Steven Mayers and Jonathan Freedman complied and edited Solito, Solita: Crossing Borders with Youth Refugees from Central America, which was published by Haymarket Books as part of the Voice of Witness book series in 2019. Since 2019, they have been listening to the stories of environmentally displaced people and defenders of the land. Steven Mayers is an oral historian, writer, and professor in the English Department at the City College of San Francisco. Jonathan Freedman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, and social activist with more than forty years’ experience reporting from South America, Central America, Mexico, and the US border. His six-year series of investigative editorials for the San Diego Tribune was influential in the passage of the landmark 1986 US immigration reforms that authorized 2.7 million undocumented immigrants to become permanent legal residents.
Solito2Solidarity 