Under a Thousand year old Fig Tree. Where Indigenous beliefs and Climate Change Collide.

The elders say the fig tree remembers everything. It stood at the center of the village for more than a thousand years, wide and patient its roots gripping the same soil that had fed generations before us. Beneath its branches, our ancestors had gathered in times of uncertainty times of drought hunger and waiting.

I had heard about this place a lot before, but I had never stood beneath it. This was my first rain-making ceremony attendance. I stood among the young people at the edge of the gathering, unsure of where exactly I belonged. I had grown up hearing stories about these ceremonies, how they called on ancestors, how the rains would eventually come, but I had never witnessed one for myself.

And truthfully, I had not come only to observe and learn, deep within me, I carried a question I could not easily voice: Can indigenous beliefs still hold power in a time like this? Can they withstand something as vast and unforgiving as climate change?

Indigenous traditional leaders arrived first, wrapped in authority and memory. Then came the elders leaning on carved sticks, their presence steady and deliberate. Women followed, carrying clay pots and quiet prayers. The air shifted as the ceremony began, songs rising slowly, names of ancestors spoken into the wind and snuff offered to the earth.

I watched closely trying to understand, trying to see whether what was unfolding before me was a ritual, memory or something more. For a moment it felt as if the past had stepped into the present, and I had somehow arrived late to something sacred and long understood.

When it was over, no one rushed away as they used to tell us. People lingered beneath the fig tree with their eyes fixed on the sky as if they where waiting for it to respond. I found myself doing the same, searching for something I could not quite name, a sign, a shift, or any proof that something had been set in motion. But the sky remained still.

We began to walk back to our homes carrying hope the way one carries water in cupped hands, carefully and quietly, afraid to lose it too soon. As we walked, I overheard older voices speaking with certainty. They recalled a different ending. They spoke of how when they where young the rains would begin before they even reached home. How the clouds would gather as the ceremony ended and how the first drops would fall as if in direct answer. They laughed softly at the memory running through the rain, soaked but joyful, the earth releasing that unmistakable scent of life returning.

Back then, the ceremony worked. Or at least, they believed it did.

This time was different, days passed, then weeks and suddenly months. The clouds came occasionally drifting across the sky as if undecided, but they did not break. The fields remained dry, the soil cracked open, tired and unresponsive. Seeds planted in faith stayed buried in silence. At first, people said, it will come. Then they said, it is late. Eventually, they said nothing at all.

In my village climate change is not something people sit down to define. It is something they live and experience. It is in the confusion of seasons that no longer follow their own patterns. It is in the sun that feels harsher, staying longer than it should. It is in the shrinking harvests that no longer meet the needs of a household. People do not call it “climate change,” elders say the seasons have lost their discipline and farmers say the soil no longer listens.

Some say the ancestors are angry. Others wonder if the rituals are no longer done the right way. And some especially the young do not try to explain it at all. They are already thinking of leaving, finding lives elsewhere away from land that no longer promises anything certain.

What complicates everything is that these same communities continue to hold deeply onto indigenous beliefs, beliefs that give meaning, identity, and comfort. But within those everyday ways of living, there are also practices that quietly contribute to the very changes they are trying to understand. Cutting down trees for fuel without replacement, uncontrolled burning of land, over-reliance on fragile soils without restoration, actions repeated not out of malice, but out of survival and habit. I find myself thinking often about this tension. I wish I could find a way to help people see that climate change is not only something happening to us but something we are also interacting with daily. And more than anything I wish I could succeed in helping my community bridge this understanding so that belief and awareness do not stand in opposition, but work together to protect what is left and adapt to what is coming.

Standing between these perspectives, I begin to understand something I could not fully see before. My question did not have a simple answer because this is not just about belief or science. Climate change is not a concept, it is hunger, migration and quiet grief. It lives in the space between what people remember and what they are now forced to accept.

What I witnessed beneath that thousand-year-old fig tree was not failure, it was longing. It reaching back toward something that once made sense in a world that no longer responds in the same way.

The fig tree still stands at the centre of the village, holding stories I am only beginning to understand. Perhaps it remembers rains that no longer come, and voices that once called them with certainty. And perhaps one day I will return to stand beneath it not only as an observer, but as someone who comes with different kinds of knowledge, knowledge of adaptation, of irrigation methods that can help the land hold water longer, of farming practices that can protect what little rain still arrives.

I imagine gathering again under its branches but this time speaking with the elders instead of only listening to them. Not to dismiss what they believe but to connect it with what is now necessary for survival. I imagine showing how tradition and adaptation do not have to compete but can strengthen each other when the land itself is under pressure.

For now, I carry not only questions, memories, and uncertainty. But I also carry the belief that change is still possible, not only in the weather above us, but in how we choose to respond to it together. The ceremony may not bring the rain as it once did. But perhaps learning will.