Salesian Youth for Climate Action – Santiago Corrales

Teach the child well and you'll have a good future.

Santiago Corrales Rodriguez

By Don Bosco Green Alliance

February 29, 2020

Since I was very young I started to get involved with the environment because of my mother, who taught me how to take care of our planet. My father has taught me that I must be disciplined to achieve my goals. The union of these two teachings is what gives rise to my activism; I don’t like to be a simple observer knowing that I can help with some solution.

The important thing is our attitude, the immediate response. When it comes to the health of our common home, we should have incorporated the innate reflex of not polluting and this is what we have tried to do in my high school, with an ecological project that emphasizes the learning of small but constant individual recycling actions, which when spread throughout our environment become a real change.

I believe that this is the way we can educate our children so that we trace a new path of solutions. I was born in Bogota, Colombia, and have been living in Panama for 12 years. I have seen how both cities are affected by excessive consumerism and lack of citizen awareness. Most of the climatic disasters in our cities are caused by our indiscipline and ignorance of the bad management we give to our waste. We must motivate instead of waiting to be motivated, generate the change we want without waiting for others to make it.

Santiago Corrales, 18, is from Panama City, Panama and engaged with the Don Bosco Green Alliance since December 2018.

This article was first published in Don Bosco Magazin Germany in February 2020: https://www.donbosco-magazin.de