Liveit! 7 months on (20 Oct 2008)

Helen Haworth, a sixth form student at All Hallows School, Macclesfield, attended the liveit! sixth form day in Manchester in March. We found out what happened next. Helen writes:

Earlier this year a group of sixth form students including myself attended the liveit! Conference in Manchester. We learnt a lot that day about the effects of climate change on the Earth and the people in it, and left inspired to try and change the way in which we live to living simply, sustainably and in solidarity. We had hosted Shivanni and Nikki from Guyana and so we were fully conversant with their story of how climate change affects the farmers in their country.

The ways in which we tried to put this change into effect were firstly by running two retreat days for Year 9 students based on the liveit! Conference. The theme of the retreats was climate change and how we as Christians should help prevent it. The days consisted of an eco-fashion show where the year 9s made their own costumes using newspapers, binbags and polythene bags. Each group of students was a different country; China, Britain, USA, Sri Lanka and Zimbawe. The students from the richer countries had more materials than those from poorer countries to represent the unequal distribution of wealth, and these poorer countries had to trade and struggle to make their costumes. 

We also had a reflective prayer time where we prayed for those people in the world in poorer countries whose lives were affected by climate change. To emphasise the effects we set up games with messages behind them for the year 9s to play and think about, for example the water game. The water game was that we set up an empty bucket a short distance away from a full bucket of water and using straws the students had to transport the water from one bucket to another. They had a lot of fun with this game, and understood the message at the end of the game; that some people had to travel many miles to collect water. 

Another part of our retreat was that we invited guest speaker Dr Mike Edwards from CAFOD into our school on both retreat days to speak, and of course, to play his didgeridoo! The students were very interested in his speech and both days there was a long queue of students waiting to ask him questions about climate change and the didgeridoo. After this speech we asked the year 9s to write a promise of something they can do to help stop climate change on a postcard addressed to themselves which would be sent to them at a later date.

An important way in which livesimply has affected our college is that we have now performed the play "Degrees of Change" three times, twice as the retreat days to year 9s and once to the rest of our sixth form. A group of sixth form students who attended liveit!  learnt and performed this moving and inspiring play to spread the message of livesimply to our own year. These are the ways in which the liveit! Conference affected our college, and we are very grateful to the organizers of this event for this.