When Trisha Co Reyes leaves her home shortly after six in the morning to travel in a minibus to St. Stephen’s Junior High School in the Binondo district of Manila, she’s just the same as any other teenage girl. But once lessons have finished for the day, the tall 13-year-old has no time to meet her friends. Trisha’s world has consisted of paint, brushes, paper and canvas since she was seven years old. Only very occasionally does she have time to play a game of badminton with her 20-year-old sister Joselle.

Trisha’s paintings have already won prizes in numerous competitions, and she has just celebrated the biggest success in her young career. Trisha was the overall winner of the 20th International Youth Painting Competition organized by UNEP – the environment program of the United Nations – in collaboration with Bayer. Her picture on the subject of “Life in the Forests” was chosen from among entries from 99 countries.

“I’ve always enjoyed drawing,” the shy Philippine girl recalls. An art teacher has been showing her the tricks of the trade for the past few years. “She helps me develop my style and teaches me how to use the brushes and mix colors well,” she explains. She has a clear goal in life: “I want to be a famous artist!” Leonardo da Vinci is her great inspiration.

It’s no wonder that the little house where the family lives in Tondo, one of the poor districts of the Philippine capital, looks like an artist’s studio. An easel stands in the living room, under it a palette and two boxes of paint in pots and tubes. “The painting costs us a lot of money,” Trisha’s mother Conchita says. And that’s something that’s in short supply for most families in the Philippines. There is no sign of luxury here, even though Trisha’s father works in Taiwan and her mother is a secretary. Trisha and Joselle don’t have their own room, they sleep in the same room as their mother and grandmother. Nights in Manila are hot, and electricity and air-conditioning are expensive. “This way we only need to cool one room,” the mother explains.

Trisha uses a paintbrush to create the world of her dreams – a world full of colors in which nature takes center stage. In this way she can paint her idea of paradise, surrounded by the concrete, noise and traffic of the Philippine capital.

Video Brought to life: the winning picture

Trisha’s paintings are kept in a special room. A single glance is all it takes to see that she loves strong colors. The walls radiate in yellow, green, red, pink and orange. “Yes, I love bright colors, preferably neon shades,” says the girl with a shy smile, and quickly wipes the perspiration from her brow with a handkerchief that she constantly knots and unties again. It’s hot in Manila, as usual.

Many of the pictures feature plants and animals. “I’ve always been very keen on nature, and that’s why this competition is so important for me,” Trisha says. “What we people are doing with the environment – cutting down forests, polluting rivers and the air – it’s simply terrible. We have many of these problems in the Philippines, especially here in Manila. There’s very little green in the city, it’s completely built up, and the traffic is awful. That’s why the air’s so bad.”

Trisha’s winning picture helped her to paint away her worries, and also to illustrate her hopes and wishes. It shows a little girl opening a gray curtain covered with skulls. Behind the curtain is a fantastic, colorful world. A lion, a giraffe and an elephant gaze out from among brightly colored plants. It’s an ideal world transported to a canvas. And who’s the little girl? “That’s me,” says Trisha, looking away in embarrassment.

It’s obvious that the 13-year-old hopes for a different future for herself. She and her sister, who is also a talented artist, dream of escaping from Manila’s concrete jungle. “We’d love to go to Paris. We think it must be beautiful. The parks, the boulevards, the cafés and all the beautiful people,” Trisha enthuses. A picture of the Eiffel Tower that she has painted is already hanging in the living room. But Trisha is going to spend many hours at her easel before her dream of Paris comes true. When she looks up from her canvas, she can see through the open door the luxuriant pot plants that the family uses to hide the drab wall in front of the house. It’s a lovely green perspective. A bit like Trisha’s winning picture.

Winning the competition won’t get Trisha to Paris, the city of her dreams, but it will take her to Indonesia, to the TUNZA conference, where she will meet young protectors of the environment from all over the world. The painting competition and the conference are two of many projects organized jointly by Bayer and UNEP, the environment program of the United Nations.

Video Trisha: a stroke of success

Bayer and UNEP have had a common concern for many years. They support children and young people all over the world in their efforts to protect the environment. It’s a tradition that goes back many years, to the late 1990s, when Bayer and UNEP got involved in young people’s environmental activities in Asia. They decided to put their cooperation on a lasting basis in 2004, and it is still going strong today.

The aim of this collaboration is to support the activities of young people interested in protecting the environment, to help them share their experiences with like-minded people throughout the world and to give them a voice that will be heard the world over. With this in mind, the partners organize around a dozen environmental projects every year on all the continents. Bayer provides €1.2 million in funding every year, plus additional material assistance.

The partnership organizes regional and international conferences and workshops, study visits, the Tunza magazine for young people, a photo competition and a painting competition that enables children like Trisha to gain international recognition for their work. Trisha was honored at the international environmental conference for children and youth held in Bandung, Indonesia. UNEP and Bayer organized a special ceremony just for Trisha, the winner of the second prize and the regional winners.

By Hilja Müller

• Find out more: www.unep.bayer.com