My Daughter Maitén : We call her “A Voice of the Corals” when she was nervous about going public

At 12 years old, my daughter heard the young Ambassadors of the Sea in her school talking about the need to care for the coral reefs in the shorelines of her community in Puerto Viejo and the urgency of studying their resiliency. 

¨They are threatended by global warming, banana agro-industrial contamination and plastic garbage that reaches the ocean waters, but also by the contamination of sewage water in a town where a treatment plant is being created as of 2020, so we have to study, not only why the corales are dying, in Puerto Viejo we need to study HOW they are surviving despite such impact¨said 18 year old Esteban Gallo, Ambassador of the Sea in Costa Rica´s Southern Caribbean being trained in coral monitoring and restoriation in a program that granted him a scholarship by Youth Diving with a Purpose (YDWP) in the Florida Keys in 2019. 

The audience was a group of 23 Primary School students in an afteroon program in the Wolaba Youth House in the coastal town.  Maitemi seems to have heard it loud and clear. So much so, that her last 6th grade graduatation project not only about the state of the corlas, but also about the origins of their survival despite such contamination. 

She is still gathering data for the second question but when faced with the possibilities of going public in radio and social media by the Centro´s journalist, she hessitated out of sheer nerves.  She overcame it when I explained that she had the choice if being a ¨voice of the corals¨ who are voiceless without humans. 

She did great! We have to teach girls to trust their voice and help other vpiceless to have one too.