Climate Chronicles Podcast | Season 2, Episode 3
Edited transcript
Introduction
Host:
What is the true cost of a simple cup of tea?
Today, we meet Dharshani from Sri Lanka. While sitting in a warm New York café, holding a cup of black tea, her thoughts travel back to the misty hills of her homeland, to the women harvesting tea in driving rain, carrying the economy on their backs.
Dharshani shows us how climate change connects our daily comforts in New York City directly to the global hands that feed the world.
Here is Dharshani’s story.
Dharshani’s Story
Dharshani:
It was winter in New York, freezing cold.
Back home, cold belonged to the hills. It came with mist, rain, and the smell of wet earth. But New York cold was different. It was sharp and biting. It had no softness, just cold.
As I stepped out of the subway, all I wanted was a cup of tea.
I walked into the nearest café, ordered myself a cup of black tea, and sat by the window. Surrounded by the cozy interior, soft music, and the rich aroma rising from my mug, I thought, what more could I want right now?
Outside, Manhattan was doing its usual thing. Women in heavy coats rushed past, cabs honked, and steam rose from the street. This city never pauses, never softens, never waits.
I watched it all through the glass, but my thoughts left New York entirely. They traveled thousands of miles across an ocean, straight into the misty hills of Sri Lanka.
In my mind, I saw a long line of women moving through the tea bushes in heavy rain, the kind that doesn’t ask permission but soaks through everything.
I saw her clearly, walking barefoot on wet mountain soil, every step a small negotiation with the earth beneath her. On her back, a large cane basket is held only by a thick rope wrapped around her forehead.
Around her waist, she wears a padang, a crude apron cut from jute sacking, her only shield against the sharp branches tearing at her clothes as leeches crawl up her bare ankles.
Nearby, under a dry umbrella, a male supervisor shouts, “Quicker! More! Pluck more!”
She says nothing. She plucks faster, because she has to.
Whether it is blinding heat or monsoon rain tearing down the hillside, she must be in that field. Her daily wage is calculated entirely by the exact weight of the tea leaves she harvests that day.
Every leaf she misses is money her family loses. The calculation is that simple and that brutal.
She is not just feeding her children. She is feeding the island.
Tea is Sri Lanka’s lifeblood, its largest export, its economic backbone. That woman in the rain, barefoot with the rope on her forehead, she is holding up an entire economy on that back of hers.
Suddenly, the mug in my hand felt as heavy as the guilt in my heart.
I’m here, warm and comfortable, paying top dollar for a moment of peace while another woman is being soaked to the bone to make this moment possible.
I’m seeking comfort in a cup of tea that her hardship filled.
That thought stayed with me, and then I noticed something that has been quietly getting worse.
The climate around those tea fields is no longer what it was.
For a long time, when I heard the words “climate change,” I thought of distant glaciers, graphs, and scientists on panels.
How foolish I was.
Climate change showed me its true size and cruelty through harvests that no longer make sense.
The monsoons our economy was built around don’t come like they used to anymore. Instead, savage flash floods wash away the soil, or relentless droughts burn the young leaves before they can even be plucked.
Because extreme weather destroys the crops, she cannot hit her harvest targets. And when she cannot harvest enough, her children go to bed hungry.
Even the housing in the line rooms of these families is at risk of sudden landslides as the waterlogged ground collapses beneath them.
If I think this ends in Sri Lanka, I’m still not seeing clearly enough.
Right now, a woman in Colombia is watching her coffee crop fail in unseasonal heat. A woman in Ghana is standing in what used to be a cocoa field, now cracked and dry.
Women across the rice fields of Vietnam, the cotton fields of India, and the banana plantations of Ecuador are all living the same story.
Different crop, different landscape, same basket, same calculation.
Think about what we consume in a single week in New York.
Our morning coffee, evening chocolate, rice, fruits, and the very cotton clothes on our backs.
Nearly all of it is grown far away, overwhelmingly by women’s hands negotiating with a climate that has stopped keeping its promises.
When these women lose their stability, national economies begin to crack, and export revenues drop.
When those cracks spread, they can trigger a catastrophic collapse of the global agricultural supply chain, causing paralyzing food shortages that will reach every single city, including this one.
Climate change is not the future.
For millions of women in agriculture, it is already here, and they are absorbing it silently, daily, with the rope on their forehead and no umbrella in sight.
For a long time, as an immigrant woman in this massive city, I felt small, a detached onlooker.
But guilt is an empty emotion. It does nothing to dry a wet apron or feed a hungry child.
Being here in New York City is where the power is, because the entire globe is connected to us.
We are tied to these fields by the choices we make at the register, by demanding corporate accountability and paying a fair price for products that protect agricultural workers.
I realize now that climate change is not only about saving the planet, but about finally seeing the women who have been carrying it all along.
This city is filled with immigrants, daughters and sisters, just like me, who serve as the living connection to those fields.
Together, solo or collectively, we find our strength to use the power of New York to raise our voices.
It is time for the world to finally hear the women who feed and clothe it.
Closing
Host:
Thank you so much for listening. We hope these stories inspire you, just as they inspired us.
This podcast is part of a project created by New Women New Yorkers and was made possible thanks to the financial support of Con Edison.
We are deeply grateful for their belief in the power of immigrant women’s stories and for helping us uplift their voices and dreams.