Zubaida Alrubai is a 26 year-old teacher living in Mount Druitt. She graduated four years ago; and has worked as a teacher across Western Sydney schools. She is part of the project, profiling the voices of female climate advocates from Western Sydney. Here she explains her involvement in the project.
Teaching kids in the Western Sydney area where the weather is getting hotter by degrees - it is difficult.
Temperatures can get to 47 degrees or 48 degrees [celsius] in summer. There are times when winter does not feel like winter and there is a lingering heat you feel distracted by.
There has been a change even in the last four years I have been teaching.
The heat affects the kids’ learning and their ability to retain information and just be present in the moment because of how hot it can be in the classroom. As an educator, for me, the future of children is always at forefront. Not just their education, but their health and their liveability.
Zubaida Alrubai. Source: Supplied
Kids can get disengaged. They have low energy because it does take a bit more out of them to be present while it is almost a high-30 degree kind of day.
In the previous girls’ school I was teaching in, the weather was predicted to be in the 40s. The next day no one showed up. I only had two students come in out of 30.
Being in a room with 30 other people in the extreme heat can feel very suffocating. We have extreme weather plans at the school. We make sure students are properly hydrated. We make sure they are not in the sun, and in the shade as they pass through recess and lunch. They are the steps we can take on an individual level, but we need more.
That’s why I’m part of Voices for Power campaign – advocating for cleaner, more affordable energy. Part of the roadmap is to get a point where no one is suffering from extreme heat and we have policies on a local and federal level to help deal with the reality of climate change.
It’s such a big movement in the Western Sydney region because we are suffering more than Sydney’s east coast. We don’t have solutions like, “Oh we’ll go down to the beach to cool off.” That’s not a viable solution.
Zubaida Alrubai Source: Supplied
We work with policy makers and we want to engage them in conversation and share stories of us as a community. These are the people you represent – the policies need to also reflect us and our struggles and what we need.
The social and economic issues of Western Sydney create unique needs – the need for clean energy and also affordable energy. What I’d like to see done is for policy makers and stakeholders to provide solutions unique to Western Sydney and not just put a band-aid on it and say, “here’s a subsidy or monetary incentive.”
We want changes like solar gardens, community hubs so people can get their electricity bills checked and language-appropriate services because we do have a migrant population here too. Things that are specific and relevant to us as a community. On the big level we need to cut emissions and realise climate action is a necessity.
During the 2020 bushfires, my 24-year-old, healthy brother had to be hospitalised because he found it difficult to breathe with the air pollution. My other brother has a disability and is immunocompromised and we were so worried for him as well
There was that fear of unknown - with extreme heat, and extreme bushfires. At the same time, it just fired up that part of me that wanted to make solid change.
Instead of focussing on the negative, I was like: 'what are the tangible steps to fix this?'.
As told to Sarah Malik
Voices for Power campaign is part of the Sydney Alliance group – a not-for-profit coalition of community organisations aiming to make Sydney a better place to live.
