My name changes depending on the country. In Japan, my name is ”Terauchi Anheru Sakuya”. In El Salvador, my name is Angel Sakuya Muller Terauchi. I am a half Japanese and half El Salvadoran because I have both Japanese and El Salvadoran parents.
In my father’s country, El Salvador, a violent civil war broke out between government forces and guerrilla forces in 1980, killing about 75,000 people. My father was nine years old when a peace agreement was reached. He still remembers how he and his three siblings shared a raw egg and a tortilla when food was scarce due to the curfew, and how they watched through the window as guerrilla fighters died in the firefights that broke out at night. In 2024, wars are still raging, including the invasion of Ukraine and the Gaza-Israel conflict. War is not a scar of the past, but an ongoing threat to us all. The SDGs are designed to prevent and stop wars, but why are we not achieving them as much as we would like? I thought it was because of the lack of love. Therefore, I propose “act from love” as Goal 0, which is common to all 17 SDGs. For me, peace is “the connection between people and people, and between people and the Earth, through love. I believe that love is the driving force to embody peace.
I have come up with two specific actions to build this connection. The first is to make hugging a habit. Skinship through hugging allows us to feel a connection with each other that cannot be achieved through conversation alone. The second is to write messages to the earth. Although at a grassroots level, we have created a message sheet for the earth and started asking people around us to write their own messages. What will you write? When you finish writing with the words, “From me, your little part of you,” you will want to respond with love for the love that is being given to us.
We must all learn to live hand in hand and in harmony with the Earth. We are all friends who call the same planet home. I believe that we can create a peaceful future by uniting our aspirations.