montana week 1 (yseali)

free and spirited. the wings i never knew were on my back have been unclipped. i am flying at breakneck speed, and every possible idea in the wind is gushing towards me. this education which i am too blessed to have received makes me keep digging deeper into the core of my identity… and that of others, and i am beginning to understand how this planet is and came to be. 

in the vast mountains and rangelands, you see more than just a landscape, but the incredibly intricate interwovenness of the human story. i gaze to the heavens and say thank you to the peoples for your love for this earth when you treaded on it. thank you for leaving me clean air to breathe and clean water to drink. you just can’t stop saying thank you, thank you, thank you.

my body, well adjusted to southeast asia’s thirty degrees celsius, struggles to understand what am i doing in thirty degrees fahrenheit. my eyes are confused why there are no traffic jams, densely packed high-rise buildings and what on earth are mountains doing here. my mind cannot wrap itself around how people can band together and sue a state, can be so united regardless of blue-red stripes, and can believe that the economy is protected only when the environment is protected. the only logical explanation you can give your body is that you’ve plunged into another world, and it feels like one massive magical and fantastical dream. you can’t get over it; you want to hold on to every single little thing. the bird singing in the tree. the scent and smash of the rain meshed with mountains and river and forest.

but what memory do i hold on most dearly to? for now, it’s the one with rachana telling us about how Switzerland changed her life, and how she loves that country so much. because of how she learned to be proud of her Indigenous heritage there. when she realised the value of her community to the world. now she speaks with such current-like confidence, you can tell that this is one empowered girl. and now i only realise that it isn’t always a developed-developing country divide that is so often framed. because the developed country can channel their resources into uplifting the weak, empowering the disenfranchised… i want to be part of that solution too.

i want singapore to be part of that solution too. the country i have grown up with, and i am proud of some of its achievements of course but when i look back all i can think of is that this state functions primarily on capitalist logic. i know almost at the back of my hand now that every single environmental issue we have raised and will raise will be muffled down against some economic drama. i feel like i live in an ultra-rich state that is always and only trying to get richer, at the expense of not only the environment but mental and physical wellbeing… and still the moneymaking argument is so strong that i struggle to counter that.

and that was my question i had set out to answer at the start of YSEALI, and also what i feel like i’ve already learnt in this first week. in a variety of ways… some say to speak in their language, tell economics tales. some say build a people’s movement around it. some say tell personal stories. some say find a robust panel of experts on other topics. and building on what i’ve learnt from my civil society research for FYP, i think the answer is slowly coming to me in bits and pieces. it looks sometimes like rain, sometimes like sunshine… but it doesn’t matter because we can almost see and touch each other. i know she will find me.