Mindfulness: A Path to a Kinder You and a Better World

Hello. My name is Callum the Camel and I am from Morocco in the north of Africa. Full disclosure – I am not a camel because they have two humps, I am a dromedary but humans are very bad at names. They call me a camel and it’s stuck. I don’t mind too much since some of my best mates are camels, and after all what is a hump between friends?

This year has been the hardest but the best year of my life, let me tell you why.

I was just lolloping along as usual, part of the herd, nothing special. My job was to carry tourists and all their bags on camping trips into the desert for a few days. We would go out in a group of about twenty and walk for a little while then set up camp and relax before going home to our nice comfy field in the plains with plenty of delicious thorny acacias to snack on and warm sand to roll in for a good back scratch. It was, to be honest, a pretty cushy number.

But I think I went a bit over the top of on the delicious thorny acacia trees and that was my downfall. Brahim, our human, was putting together a team for an Alice Morrison Expedition. I had heard of this Explorer. She was a nutter, always running up mountains and cycling across continents and I didn’t fancy that at all. I tried to hide right at the back but he spotted me, “Callum, look how lovely and big you are. You’re exactly what we need for three long, tough months across the desert. You’ll be able to carry all the heaviest equipment, and you can live off all that fat when we run out of food.”

3 months? Run out of food? Tough? Heavy? This was not sounding good, but we camels have to earn our crust, so off I set. Alice was aiming to become the first woman ever to walk the whole length of the Draa River Valley in Morocco – 1500km (nearly 1000 miles). Every day, we’d get up before sunrise, get loaded and walk for around five to six hours till we stopped at camp for the night.  Before we started, Brahim gave us a team talk, “Now, camels, this will be difficult, you will want to give up, but we are a team and if you just keep walking, if you persevere, you’ll be the first camels ever to walk the length of the Draa. You’ll make history, imagine that.”

It was very hard. The sun was boiling hot, nearly 50 degrees, and the ground under my soft hoof pads was often sharp and rocky. One day, I stepped on a big thorn about the length of a pen and Brahim had to pull it out. I won’t repeat the very bad swear words I said. It hurt a lot.

We were walking through the desert and often it would be three days before we could drink. Now, we camels pride ourselves on not having to drink every day but that is a long time, and I was always so happy when Alice and Brahim got water from the well and poured it out for us. I liked shaking my head with all the water in my mouth and giving them a little shower to say thank you.

The worst part, though, was when we got to the wilderness. Because there had been no rain for a long, long time we had nothing to eat. My stomach rumbled and grumbled as I waited for our one meal a day of oats. Alice tried to help. She always saved her orange peel for me and gave me some of her biscuits at tea break. She ate oats too, but hers were a weird human type called porridge. Fortunately, I had my nice fat hump and I could use that to give me energy.

The months passed and I kept going. Sometimes I sang (I sound a bit like Harry Styles), sometimes I played fantasy football, sometimes I told Alice jokes although she never seemed to get them and sometimes, I looked around me at all these new places I was passing and felt amazed. Mainly though, I just persevered, kept on walking even when I was tired and hungry, and we still had a long way to go.

Then, all of a sudden, the air got cool and I saw birds for the first time in months. Ahead of me there was something big and blue with white tops that made a kind of roaring noise. Alice started whooping and running around. “Thanks be to God,” said Brahim. “We have reached the sea.” He led us into this big, moving mass of water  and I felt a new feeling. I felt proud. I had made it across 1500km and I had become the first camel ever to walk the Draa River Valley in Morocco.

“Callum, you are a hero,” said Alice, “You have done what no camel has done before and now your name will be written in the history books – Courageous Callum, Dromedary of the Draa.”

Voice of Alice Morrison   

Alice Morrison is a Scottish Adventurer based in Morocco. She is the presenter of the BBC2 Series Morocco to Timbuktu: An Arabian Adventure.  She has undertaken some tough, physical and mental challenges including: The Tour D’Afrique, cycling from Cairo to Cape Town; running round Everest;  and the Marathon des Sables, the toughest footrace on earth; She has just completed a 4000km exploration on foot of Morocco from the Mediterranean Sea to the Mauritanian with her six camels when she found dinosaur footprints and a lost city and investigated the space ships of the desert. She speaks fluent Arabic and French and 20 words of lots of different languages. “Everyone has an inner Adventurer in them, let yours out!” is her mantra.

Favourite book right now? The Home Going, by Yaa Gyasi 
  

Favourite lesson at school? English

Favourite animal/lifeform? Camels! (and cats)

Favourite hero/heroine? Freya Stark

Thank you, Voices of Future Generations Arabia, for this brilliant opportunity. In this blog, I would like to argue in favour of empowering children’s voices and quality education - SDG 4 & SDG 17, as I did in May during a symposium with over 1000 online participants.

My name is Nico, I am 11 and go to Kings College School in Cambridge. I am a UN Child Ambassador for the SDGs, and as part of this commitment I also edit an online blog - Nico’s Natural World - with over 9000 impressions, and hundreds of followers. Please come and visit it some time.

It is time that we all stand up for our children’s rights - as reflected in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), especially Articles 24 and 29 that promise us a healthy environment and education about nature, and also Articles 12 to 13 that guarantee us a voice in decisions that concern us.

Our future, and the futures of all species on Earth, concern us! They really do!

I might be only a small child, but I know that advancing the world’s SDGs, especially SDG 13 on Climate Action and SDG 15 to Protect Life on Land, makes the difference between a terrible global nightmare, and the future we want.

Even as our whole world is locked in frightening quarantines and curfews from the global COVID-19 pandemic, we can and must still speak out for our Earth, and for future generations of all species.

Climate change and biodiversity loss are real, dangerous and urgent.

As children, we are trying very hard to be heard, locally and globally, to stop the suffering and losses from getting even worse.

Even though we cannot vote, as children we already face the consequences of terrible climate change worldwide, including new viruses emerging, and old diseases returning, with impacts on our health and on the safely of everyone we love.

And we will face far, far worse in the future.

Currently, some decision-makers are doing the exact opposite,

backing up failing aviation and oil industries, which are causing the problem!

This is horribly unfair - it is a violation of climate justice!

The CRC promises us a healthy environment and this right means that willful destruction of natural habitats, without any regard for the plants and animals, nor for all future generations… just needs to stop.

We live in a climate emergency, and it will get worse if we can’t all work together, rather than re-starting all the harmful practices, and calling it recovery!

We also live in a biodiversity emergency, with thousands of species already lost, and many more at risk of going extinct forever—unless we all help to protect nature recovery when we plan economic recovery!

We must make sure our leaders tackle the climate and biodiversity crises with the same strength and unity they have shown us with the novel coronavirus pandemic, instead of ignoring it until everything is just too late!

If we want to make a difference, we must scale up our understanding, our education and our voices!

We need new guardian laws, institutions and networks.

The world after the COVID-19 pandemic needs to take children’s fears and interests much more seriously.

I am pleading for every single leader, including everyone reading online, to help us find new ways to stop the urgent threats of climate change and biodiversity loss, just as you promised in the SDGs.

Our rights are being directly infringed by current policies, laws and decisions – locally, nationally and internationally.

Even the smallest child CAN make a BIG difference, towards a more sustainable world for us all.

Voice of Nico Roman

Nico Roman (11), UN Child Ambassador for the SDGs, Voices of Future Generations Children’s Rights Initiative; Co-Chair, Cambridge Schools Eco-Council & YR6 Student, King’s College School (Cambridge)

Have you ever heard that without bees it would be almost impossible for humans to survive? It’s because bees are the most important pollinators in the world, essential for growing crops that we need for our food. Bees transfer pollen from flower to flower which allows plants to grow seeds and fruit.

Bees live in hives (or colonies). An average hive houses around 50,000 bees. In the hive, the most important bee is the queen bee. She lays the eggs that produce all the other bees. The female bees are called “workers” and they do the important work of pollination, whereas the male bees are called drones whose only job is to mate with the queen bee. A typical worker bee lives for about 5-6 weeks whereas a queen bee can live for up to 5 years.

Only female bees have stingers. A bee can only sting once because the stinger has barbs and it gets ripped off from the bee’s body when it stings someone.

Bees have a super sharp sense of smell. Each honey bee has about 170 odour receptors and they use these to distinguish between types of flowers and communicate with each other in the hive.

There are about 20,000 different species of bees but the type of bee we are most familiar with is the honey bee. Honey bees produce honey as a food source for themselves for the winter months. One of the reasons why vegans don’t eat honey is because of the problems with commercial farming and extraction where all the honey is taken from the hive and replaced by a sugary water for the bees which doesn’t contain the nutrients found in honey. Some advocate for “balanced beekeeping” so that humans can enjoy honey and leave some for the bees too.

Unfortunately, billions of bees around the world are disappearing. In some regions 90% of the bee population has disappeared. This is called ‘colony collapse disorder’. The reasons for this are not all known, but some scientists say it may be due to the harmful practice of commercial extraction of honey that leaves the bees ill or weak. The use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers on plants and the decline in biodiversity, especially nectar-carrying plants and flowers, is also contributing to it.

One of the things we can do is to plant a bee-friendly garden (even if it’s a few pots on our balcony) with plants such as lavender that produce the nectar bees feed on. 

Voice of Tamreez Inam 

Tamreez Inam works for the Emirates Literature Foundation. She is an avid reader and aspiring writer and loves talking about books on her Instagram account @tamreezi.