GLADYS WANGECI GITAU-DAMASKOS: Suddenly I notice that there are sirens all around me, there are choppers above me, and there's a plume of smoke coming from where my house is across the river.

EBEN BEIN: One of my students holds up her homemade picture frame, puts it around her face, and leads my students in their chant: "We are the future, framing the future."

ANTONIO ROCHA: And all of a sudden, my heart was beating here.

My legs had turned to like overcooked pasta, and I'm like, "What do I do about this?"

WES HAZARD: Tonight's theme is "In the Name of Justice."

♪ So often when we experience injustice, we know a deep, personal loss.

And taking those feelings and putting them towards the fight to make things right can seem like a long and impossible road.

I mean, after all, the odds are against us.

The struggle is great.

However, no matter what, whether we succeed or fail, that search carries its own rewards.

GITAU-DAMASKOS: My name is Gladys Wangeci Gitau-Damaskos.

I am a writer, an artist, a teacher from Lawrence, Massachusetts.

I was born in Kenya, which is in East Africa, and a lot of my art surrounds being an immigrant and what it's like to take up space in America.

And what do you explore most in your writing?

I think I just explore a lot of my identity and myself.

I write about what I remember about being in Kenya, I write about my neighborhood of Lawrence.

Anything that helps solidify that I am here right now.

Our theme tonight is "In the Name of Justice."

When you hear that, what does that sort of mean to you?

I think justice, for me, means telling the story, making sure that there's record of something happening.

A lot of times, when things happen to marginalized communities, a lot of folks with power will erase that story, and it won't exist in the public record, and it will slip away from people's memory.

And then when you come back and you have all these trauma and symptoms of what happened, it's hard to address the issue because there's no record of it.

So, for me, the first thing that happens when we seek justice is we have to tell the story so it exists in the public record.

And that's what I want to do here today.

♪ On Thursday, September 13, 2018, I stay after school at work for a party at my job as a humanities teacher in Lawrence, Massachusetts, which is about 40 minutes north of Boston.

There are parents, teachers, students, and local business owners there to celebrate that we'd become an independent charter.

About 30 minutes before the party is set to end, a friend and I decide that we're going to leave early because we don't want to get stuck in traffic.

Of course, we end up getting stuck in said traffic anyway.

And as I'm sitting there in the car, I'm scrolling through Twitter when I see something very, very concerning.

Someone has tweeted "pray for South Lawrence."

Now, Lawrence is an old mill city.

It's about seven square miles total, and it's split by a river which creates North and South Lawrence.

Why would somebody say "pray for South Lawrence" and not all of Lawrence in general?

I keep scrolling and I see that there are reports of houses randomly combusting in my neighborhood.

Suddenly I notice that there are sirens all around me, there are choppers above me, and there's a plume of smoke coming from where my house is across the river.

We continue in traffic until we eventually get off the highway and approach my house.

I see families filing into the streets, people with babies, children, students.

I approach an older gentleman and I ask him what's going on.

He replies to me in Spanish, which I don't understand, but everybody seems genuinely confused.

The reports are saying that houses are exploding because of over-pressurized gas lines that have been installed by my gas provider, Columbia Gas, and that we must all evacuate.

They're also saying that folks who are still in their homes, they should not open or close any doors or their houses will explode.

I remember thinking, how can you get out of your house if you can't open or close any doors?

Right before my block, we decide to turn back to the highway and join the line of evacuating people in the city.

Luckily, no one is home.

The only person I live with, my husband, works in Boston, and I call him to tell him not to get on the train that stops in South Lawrence, but instead to get off where he is, and we'll come get him.

I am worried about the house, though.

It's my parents' house, and they leave me in charge of it since they live in California.

I call my father across the country and I tell him what's going on, and even though he's in shock, he arranges for us to stay with a family friend.

On our way to Boston, about an hour in, I receive a call from my principal saying that one of my students, Leonel, has passed away from the explosions.

Now, Leonel was a young man that I had taught the year before, and him and I didn't always get along, but this year he had told me it was was going to be his year.

So he had actually turned in his homework the day before, because he wasn't going to be in school that day.

It was his birthday, and he was going to take his driver's test.

According to my principal, he took his driver's test, he passed, and he had driven to a friend's house where he was sitting in the driveway when the house exploded.

The chimney then fell on his car, killing him and injuring his friend.

I am devastated by this news.

Immediately I am struck by the fact that if someone I know has passed away from this environmental disaster, then there are so many more people that are going to die before the day is through.

When we eventually arrive at my friend's house, there are 80 individual fires raging across three different cities.

We sit on the couch the entire weekend, watching reports of Leonel's face flashing on the news as the only casualty of this tragedy, thank God.

But I also see my neighbor's house burning on the news, the bodega near my house abandoned.

And I see city and state officials frazzled at press conferences, but they themselves not knowing what's going on.

I want to be really angry at Columbia Gas, who routinely takes my money for gas and heat.

I want to be righteous in my anger that something so catastrophic had happened to my city.

But instead, I am numb and afraid.

When we eventually return to my house, there are people I've never seen before in yellow jackets who are drilling nonchalantly up and down the street for months.

They come into our house, saying that they need to check this or turn that off, and we're just expected to let them in because "they work for Columbia Gas."

I feel increasingly unsafe.

We are assigned a ride share service during this time to drive us to and from work.

They give us a gym membership so that we can shower, because we have no hot water, and they give us money to replace all the food that has rotted when we evacuated.

I don't know how to sleep during this time.

I often wake up in the middle of the night thinking that the house is on fire.

I always feel the ground shaking, no thanks to the drilling yellow jackets.

And I'm often doomscrolling on Twitter, searching the words "South Lawrence," lamenting that like many of my millennial peers, I do not own a television.

Eventually, when it gets cold around October, they relocate us to a hotel in Chelmsford because our house has no heat.

During that time, we're assigned many different drivers, many of whom ask me where I'm from.

When I tell them Lawrence, they empathize with my experience, and they ask me how I'm doing.

Many of these rides are therapeutic, and they soothe me until I can make it to a therapist to help me process this experience.

During one ride, with a young man from Lawrence, we talk about how unjust it is that something like this is happening in an immigrant community where many of us do not own our homes and will not receive insurance payouts.

We talk about how we are always expected to survive things like this and be grateful that we're alive.

I mentioned to him that Columbia Gas is having a town hall where they'll be listening to the grievances of the people affected by this disaster.

"Why would I go to that?"

he says.

"People like that never listen to us."

I feel his frustration.

These people had hurt us, after all, but why not go?

If they listen, they listen.

If they say no, they say no.

At least we spoke up for ourselves.

Truthfully, I have trouble taking my own advice.

There are times when Columbia Gas said that they're going to send a check by the state, or something will be fixed by this time, and it doesn't happen.

Like many of my neighbors, I am tired of waiting.

But months later, when I can finally sleep, I take my own advice, and I go down to a town hall to testify about my lived experience.

I share with them a poem I wrote about how to sleep again after houses randomly combust in your neighborhood, to remind myself that I don't just deserve to survive, I deserve to feel safe, and I deserve to have peace of mind, especially in my own home and neighborhood.

Thank you.

(applause) ♪ BEIN: My name is Eben Bein.

He or they pronouns are great.

I grew up on Nipmuck land, also known as Acton, Massachusetts, currently living on Pawtucket land, also known as Cambridge.

And I am an educator, first a high school teacher and now currently working for a nonprofit where I empower young people to build climate justice coalitions and talk to their legislators about climate justice policy.

Have you ever told a story on stage before?

No.

I've been on stage before.

I've done presentations.

I was a high school teacher, so I was in front of a classroom a lot.

But I have never told a story, and I'm surprised at how nervous I am.

(both laugh) HAZARD: Well, you know, we're very sure that you're going to be fantastic.

I can't wait to hear your story.

I'm wondering, how do you feel that storytelling can bring your work to life, your professional work?

So much of climate justice gets buried in numbers, things that feel disconnected from being a human.

But climate justice is about being human, so I'm hoping that my storytelling will bring in that human connection.

A few years ago, I was leaning against a radiator in a cramped, sweaty legislator's office in the Massachusetts State House, and it was uncomfortably quiet.

A member of my group had just asked a question, and there was an NPR reporter who was ferrying a microphone back and forth between us, and she held the microphone up to the legislator's mouth, and her lips were moving, but no words were coming out.

As I listened to the legislator fail to produce sound, and the second stretched on, I found myself feeling sympathetic, and I was transported back five years to another cramped, sweaty room: my old classroom in Revere High School.

I just clicked pause on a documentary which was telling us how, despite the many disasters that are already unfolding, things are about to get much worse.

And every day, fossil fuel companies are spending millions of dollars-- millions of dollars a day-- to look for more fuels that we cannot afford to burn.

So I click pause, and that's when a student in the front row, Morgan, raises her hand and asks a question I was not prepared for.

"So, why aren't we doing something about this?"

(exhales, quiet laughter from audience) And I looked out at my sea of students, and I did not know what to say.

Climate change was not some far-off abstract concept to them.

I had immigrants from all continents in my classroom.

So this includes countries that are already ravaged by floods and forest fires and droughts and climate-induced war.

Them, sitting next to students who had been in the area for generations.

And by the area, I mean close to Revere Beach, and upwind of Logan Airport, where they experience some of the worst climate flooding and climate-induced air pollution in the state.

And then, in the back right-hand corner of my class was my student Sam.

She was usually a happy-go-lucky person, as passionate about biology as about basketball.

And in that silence, her face was a mask.

Her mom, single mother with disabilities, would end up spending her retirement savings to replace the family's only car, which was totaled in a historic flood, so that she could continue to drive Sam to basketball practice.

So when Morgan asked, "Why aren't we doing something about this?"

and I failed to produce sound, all I could hear in my head was this voice saying, "Does anything you do matter?"

The words that eventually came out were "Great question!"

(awkward chuckle) And we sort of muddled our way through the rest of the lesson.

But in the days that follow, I could not stop thinking about this.

I was, as the young people say, shook by Morgan's question.

I would be up late nights looking at my lesson plans, thinking, you know, with that voice in my head saying, "Does any of this matter?"

And it wasn't until about a year later that I had a sense of what did.

25 students of mine and myself would find ourselves in the streets of New York City.

See, it turns out that my students also shared my concerns.

We had started a club; it was called "Revere Environmental Voice," or REV for short.

And eventually we decided to participate in the People's Climate March on September 21, 2014.

And the theme of the event, the organizers told us, was "Sound the Alarm on Climate Change."

And so, as the organizers had told us, at 12:58, everybody in New York City went silent.

All I could hear was the pad of people's shoes on the concrete, and the electric whine of the buildings around us.

Somewhere in the masses, a person reached their arms up like this, like they were embracing the atmosphere.

And then 600,000 other arms went up the same, and we just walked like this.

And then-- 1:00, the alarm sounds.

A huge tsunami of sound washes down the avenue.

Drums, vuvuzelas, noisemakers.

We're screaming.

We're shouting at the top of our lungs.

One of my students holds up her homemade picture frame, puts it around her face, and leads my students in their chant: "We are the future, framing the future."

On the drive home, Sam turned to me and said, "Mr. Bein, I think we really made a difference today."

And something shifted in me.

I felt that I-- we-- had, for the first time, connected to the larger movement.

Now, the spell was broken by the time I returned to class on Monday morning, and we had to continue preparing for the Massachusetts state biology test.

As REV's work grew more expansive and more beautiful, it became harder and harder for us to weave it meaningfully into the class, where it would actually be accessible to all of my students.

I actually ended up designing a version of the curriculum that would treat environmental justice as a year-long theme.

But when I showed it to my supervisors, they got nervous.

So, I quit.

Because when Morgan asked me, "Why aren't we doing something about this?"

she gave me the gift of silence.

Silence to reach deeply into myself, past the excuses, past the busy work, past the easy answers, and get to the work that truly matters.

And while I love DNA polymerase and independent variables and mitochondria more than just about any human, for most of our students, other things matter more.

And that is why, five years later, I would find myself in a cramped, sweaty legislator's office in the Massachusetts State House with no one other than Sam herself, a college student by then, who had joined my program at the youth-founded nonprofit Our Climate.

And I was listening to Sam tell her legislator her climate justice story and ask questions.

Difficult questions, about legislation that we had helped to write that went to committee and mysteriously died there.

Committees which, by the way, in our fair state of Massachusetts, are for some reason exempt from the public record.

And so while I watched her legislator struggle to produce words, and I could practically hear the voices shouting in her head, in that moment, the voices in my own head were, for a change, silent.

Thank you.

(applause) ROCHA: My name is Antonio Rocha, and I am from Brazil, born and bred.

When I was 22, I moved to Maine to follow my dream to be a mime and theater artist and storyteller, and... and that's what I've been doing for a living for close to three decades now.

And so you are a storyteller with a extensive background in mime.

I'm wondering, how does that inform the way that you share stories?

When you go on stage to tell a story verbally, the body is the first thing the audience sees.

So if you don't know what you're doing with your body, the body can be a... an obstacle.

If you know what you're doing, then it's an asset.

So, what sparked your interest in mime?

The ability that the mime has to make the invisible visible in a black box.

There's nothing there.

The mime walks onto the black box, and a whole world ignites through movement, a whole plot with characters and emotions and... everything through the body of the mime.

♪ It was 1987, and I was performing as a mime at the first Latin American Festival of Arts and Culture.

This festival was taking place at a university in the capital city of Brazil, Brasília.

Brazil was two years out of a 20-year dictatorship, and we had gone to this festival to celebrate freedom and the end of oppression through the arts.

You heard me right, I was performing as a mime.

I had fallen in love with the art of making the invisible visible through movement and gesture.

I had been inspired by Marcel Marceau.

By Chaplin.

At the end of my impromptu sets, two friends of mine approached me.

They said, "Come with us, come with us.

There's a protest going on in one of the lecture halls."

So, still dressed in my mime attire, you know, I kind of jogged along through the hallways, and we got to this amphitheater.

The door that we entered was way up in the back of the lecture hall, and there was a mob of about 400 people going, "Go home, go home, go home, go home."

It was filled with energy, that room.

And as I looked down towards the table, way at the bottom, there was an elderly man sitting there, facing the mob.

There was an assistant behind him, and on the walls there are two signs.

One said, "Get your bloody hands out of our festival."

The other one said, "We're here to hear the resistance, not a representative of the dictatorship."

Between this gentleman and the mob was the national media.

The likes of The New York Times and Boston Globe of Brazil were there, registering everything.

And I soon learned what was going on.

This elderly man in his 70s was a professor from Chile, and he had been handpicked by the dictator in Chile, Augusto Pinochet, to go to our festival and give a lecture on the life of Pablo Neruda.

Pablo Neruda was a poet from Chile, a Nobel Prize laureate, a man who stood for freedom and against oppression.

And here is a man handpicked by the military regime of Chile to come to this art festival and lecture about the life of this man.

Of course they wanted him to go home.

"Go home, go home, go home, go home."

And I'm there just taking it all in, and I felt compelled to do something about it.

I know I had done some political street theater, and I had just started doing mime, and I'm like, "I can do something "for peace and freedom here.

I can add on to this."

So I start to go down towards a man who is holding a mic.

I thought, "You know, I think he's the moderator."

And I said, "I'd like to do something for freedom here."

And he looks me up and down, you know, my 30-pound-lighter self, big Afro.

I was still doing the white face from him at the time.

And he kind of smiles and turns to the mob and says, "He'd like to do something for peace and freedom."

And they look at me and they size me up, and they start to chant, "On the table, on the table, on the table!"

I'm like, "Say what?"

They wanted me to perform on the table that the man is sitting at.

If I get on the table, I'm going to get arrested.

If I leave the room, I'm going to be framed as a coward.

I have to do something right here, but they wouldn't let me.

"On the table, on the table!"

I looked at the professor, and the professor was straight-faced.

He was not saying yes, he was not saying no.

His assistant was his bodyguard, and he was stanced looking at me and looking at the professor.

The culture attaché from the Embassy of Chile was there and the students, "On the table!"

And all of a sudden my heart was beating here.

My legs had turned to like overcooked pasta.

And I'm like, what do I do about this?

And the whole room was like, (slowly): "On the table!"

And all of a sudden, my legs began moving so fast.

My legs start moving so fast and so fast.

And when they stopped and I looked down, there was a table under my feet.

(laughter) I was still not arrested.

That's a good thing.

So I better do whatever...

I had no idea what I was going to do.

It was going to be an impromptu performance for peace.

But all of a sudden, I got it.

I got the whole piece.

I reached down, and I picked up a military-grade rifle, a mimed one.

This is a story about a mime performance.

(laughter) And I put it on my shoulder and I marched like a soldier, across the table to the center of it, where the professor was sitting.

And then I started to scan the rifle towards the crowd.

The room fell silent.

And then I let out a scream that filled the whole campus.

It was a primal scream.

And as I was doing that, the rifle was turning into a small box.

Only computer CGI and a mime can pull that off.

(laughter) And I opened the box ever so gently, and a bird flew out.

I jumped off the table and I left.

Wow.

The next day I was on all the newspapers from the hinterlands of the Amazon to the coast.

"Mime keeps professor from Chile from lecturing."

"Mime performs for peace and against oppression."

I'm a 22-year-old trying to just do some impromptu performances and now I'm, I'm going to get arrested.

They're going to have my name, they're going to come after me.

I'm going to disappear.

My friend stood by me and nothing came of it.

But a lot came of it.

The next year, I would land a scholarship and go to Maine to study with Tony Montanaro.

The dictatorship in Chile ended in 1990.

By the time of his death, dictator Augusto Pinochet had some 300 cases against him for human rights violation.

As Pablo Naruda said, and I quote, "You may cut all the flowers, but you can't keep spring from coming."

Thank you.

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