Amaya: A Voice for Seals
Hello, I am Amaya, and I am 12 years old. I have Autism and I struggle with communication, but I try to find different ways to communicate. When I am passionate about something, I will try to communicate about it and spread my message.
When I was 6 years old my family took me on a holiday to Hunstanton and whilst on the beach, I found a seal that had died but had a flying ring around its neck. This really upset me as I could not understand why someone had left the flying ring and this had made the seal die. When I got home, I researched everything I could about seals, and I made a poster about people taking rubbish home with them. Since then, I have written and illustrated a book that is all about seals. This has been published, and alongside this, I have made posters and YouTube videos all about seals.
The Adventures of Boo: https://www.amazon.co.uk/adventures-Boo-Save-seals-ebook/dp/B0DVLZQ981
I help run a monthly beach clean on Heacham beach with my mummy. Due to the beach clean and my published books, people in Norfolk have started to invite me to attend events for them to give out information on cleaning the beach and on seals. Two of the recent events I have attended is one at Hunstanton which was a big litter picking event and the other was at a RNLI emergency day event. We had a lot of people turn up for them which was really encouraging. While at these events, I handed out leaflets, stickers and informed people about the seal petitions.
Give Seals Space:
https://www.change.org/p/give-seals-space
Stop the import of flying rings:
I also at the events sold my seal book to people. They were excited when they looked at the book and mainly they were adults either taking it home for their children or giving it to their children that they had bought along with them.
Going forward, I am going to carry on making books and posters about helping the seals along with my YouTube videos I make about seals. I am also going to be attending more events and handing out leaflets about seals especially at our beach clean events. I feel it is important to get as many people educated about seals as they can as the seals do not have a voice and we should be that voice for them.
You can see more about what I get up to with seals and events on my YouTube channel autistic marine hero: https://www.youtube.com/@AutisticMarineHero, my Instagram autisticmarinehero and my friendship bear and adventures of boo.
