A Simple Truth – Antonio’s Story

LENGUA-LANGUAGE: Spanish

While on a Seres community outreach trip in El Salvador in January of this year, I met Antonio, a 23yr old campesino from a small community about 20 minutes outside of Suchitoto who is working to educate his community about climate change and sustainable development. He is a truly dedicated, passionate and inspirational young man that has achieved – and continues to achieve – amazing changes in his community.
I met Antonio one morning on a visit to the demonstration site of El Instituto de Permacultura de El Salvador (IPES) – an astounding project that has over 10 years of success in teaching healthier, more environmentally sound agricultural practices to subsistence farming communities. Antonio works 3 days at the Permaculture Institute – about 50 minutes walk from his community of Papaturro. His passion and dream is to work within the field of sustainable development, teaching communities such as his own about climate change and alternative ways of living more sustainably.
In the poor rural communities of Central America, to find someone like Antonio is truly outstanding. I was curious to learn more about what it was that had led him down this path, and so we spent that afternoon sharing stories and becoming friends. Antonio’s moment of awakening was a few years ago, when he had the chance to see Al Gore’s climate change film – An Inconvenient Truth. The movie had a truly profound effect on Antonio: “I felt moved, broken and culpable…but after a few days, I asked myself: what can I do?” Antonio started talking with his friends, telling them about what he had found out, and taking them to see the movie. They decided to form a committee, whose mission was the “defence of the environment”. [Antonio] “When we started, the group had 15 people – now it has 27…and we are very interested to learn more about how we can protect the environment”.
When I asked Antonio what he saw for his future, and the future of the group he told me: “I want to be a trained expert in the Environmental Field…to know more precisely about the problems and challenges that we face with climate change [so that] I can look for alternative solutions…I would like to develop advocacy programs and projects [and] work within the environmental network for an international organisation. I wish that everyone knew about climate change – I want to make them aware of the serious and dangerous problem that is now happening worldwide.”
I cannot help but get excited everytime that I work with Antonio – when I see the changes that he has made in his community, and the dreams that he has for the future, I know that he will achieve great things. It is serendipitous that his path has crossed with Seres, and I believe that this friendship will be one that last for many years – with many successes – to come.