The voice of ourselves

For the cover of Women Church World, we have chosen Txai Suruí, the youngest of the women we have included in this edition. Her fight to protect the Amazon is building a bridge between the past and the future of women’s environmental activism, hence our choice. Txai Suruí has picked up the baton of the many heroines -and too often martyrs-, of the earth and at the same time shows foresight in identifying new and additional ways to combat the environmental crisis that our carelessness risks aggravating.  In the native language of Txai, people self-identify with the term Paiter, which means “our people”, “ourselves”. It may well become a universal self-identification, because the issue of the preservation of the Amazon rainforest concerns the whole world, it is not the “home” problem of an ethnic group of a thousand people. It concerns us all. It was Txai’s father, the Grand Chief Almir, who was the first Suruí Amerindian to attend university, and study biology, where he discovered the Internet and the importance of the Web to transmit the voice of his people and the peoples of the Amazon.   (Photo from Wikimedia Commons: Author Ana Pessoa/Midia Ninja/CopCollab25)