Youth Camp Malang

I was invited by Wahid Foundation to attend a camp in Malang, and I want to thank them and also UN Women for giving me an opportunity to get wonderful experiences there.

 13 December 2018

The event begins after the sun has set and after all of the participants has checked in to their own hotel room.  It begins with prayer and then opening speech from Doreen BUETTTNER who works at UN Women as Women Peace Security Speciality. She works with judges, police, court and prosecution provide justice for women so that they can claim their rights and get access for justice. She also works for the empowerment of economy for women and abolition of violence towards women.

In her speech, she said that women’s rights have a long way. A hundred years ago, only two countries allowed women to vote. At that time, women are not allowed to be doctors or lawyers, become as property for their father or husband. But today, many things are better. Women can be doctors or lawyers. But, women still get paid less than men for the same job and at leadership around the world, there’s still a few women compare to men to make decisions, on international level. She also stated that 1 out of 3 women experience violence in their life.

Over the last decade century, a lot of women and men have fought for gender equality. Now it’s time for younger generation to pick off, to make sure that rights can be claimed, that women are protected, and women are fully involve with the problems of the world so we are not only standing watching the men solve the problem.

On the next few days, we will discuss and get more knowledge about peace, gender and extremism based on violence. We are encouraged to speak up and to fully participate in this event. Another objective of this youth camp is to teach us skills for campaign and conveying messages effectively through social media and to motivate young generations to have a role in keeping peace within their country.

 

14 December 2018

Next morning, we do some games to get to know one another. After that, we begin the first activity. This activity wants us to decide our personality according to the statement that would be mentioned soon. We can disagree, agree or having neutral personality.

The second activity, we were asked to place three stickers that labelled W (woman), M (Men) and I (myself) respectively on a drawing that shows layers of influence in certain aspects. We have to stick it based on the facts that are happening in reality. The core implied the most influencer. For example, in global aspect, Men are dominating the leadership in global problem, only few are women.

The aspects are school, global environment, national environment, friendship circle, religious environment, family, village environment and job.

Then, the next activity is we have to decide the personality of men and women. This one we are in groups. From what I observe, some people in my group still have the stereotype of community about men and women. Me and other people in the group that doesn’t believe in these stereotypes, trying to explain to them why you should reconsider this kind of mind-set. If you said that women are emotional and men aren’t, then why most people killed by men? That’s mean that those men cannot control their emotions and let it loose which sometimes get people killed. So we decided to write down emotional and multi-tasking as the personality of both.

Some of us insist that men are indifferent, aggressive, have too much pride and have fatherly feels. Though I have all those personalities except the last one (but I don’t consider it as personality). And I am a woman. Whilst women –they decided- are humble, thorough, complicated (in this case it’s not about feelings), have PMS, sexual assault victims and giving birth. I disagree that humble and being thorough are women’s personality because men also have those. Being complicated, men can be complicated too but women are more than men when women have their periods. Undergo PMS is actually have nothing to do with personality. Then, most victim of sexual assaults are women, men are much lesser. And giving birth also not personality, it is the function of the organ in female body.

After that, we were told to explain why we choose those personalities on men and women. When it’s my turn to explain, I said that personality cannot be decided by gender because both men and women share those personalities. I exclude traits that can only be carried by specific organs in men and women since those are not personality traits, but more like physical traits. And I explain to them that I have taken personality test on a website (I forget the name of the website) and from their research, human is divided into 16 personalities. Not divided by gender. I’ve also read a book about personality and it divides human personality into 4 personalities which are melancholic, phlegmatic, sanguine and choleric.

So after other groups have presenting their presentation, UN Women asking us whether the personality traits (not physical traits) can be learnt or not. And we realise that personality traits can be learnt. In conclusion, personality cannot be decided by gender.

Moving on, we were paired into two and sit back to back. My friend on my back is given a drawing and has to describe it to me then I will draw it based on her description with limited time whilst I can’t ask question to her. And then vice versa. The drawings unsurprisingly are different than the original drawings. From this, we can learn that communication is really important, every people have different perspectives or point of view,  we have to take advantage of the given time and try to manage it, and etc.          

After lunch, we continue our activity. This one, we have a researcher from Prasasti Perdamaian Production, an NGO where my younger sister works at, to be a lecturer. She asked us to make lists of things we have post on social media.

We do what she told us to do, and then she began explaining how social media become one of extremist group’s weapons to recruit more people. They take advantage of it and adapted to it quickly whilst the government is still slow at countering them through social media. This extremist group herding fake accounts just to spread their ideology. Whenever one of their accounts taken down by government more will bear. She showed us a film produced by Prasasti Production, titled “Pengantin” or “The Bride”. It is about two women that was recruited by ISIS through social media and get married with ISIS fighters also through social media, just so they can execute suicide bomb. Those women were Indonesian migrant workers that worked in Republic of China. But not all migrant workers have dark experience, some are successful. In this film, it also shows us a successful migrant worker who also found her husband-to-be through social media.

 I’ve already expected my younger sister will be called to the front to share her story how our family went to ISIS territory for a better life, but I didn’t expected to be called too. We get much information about ISIS through social media but my younger sister was really intense at finding information about them.

So after we tell our story, the lecturer continue that one of the reason why people easily recruited by ISIS is because the lack of intimacy in family. And ISIS will take advantage of the weakness by welcoming them and with more warm than their own family. If the weakness is because of financial problem, ISIS will promise them that they will get a job with high salary if they move to ISIS territory.

The conclusion I get from these activities on our first day is women can help to maintain peace around the world, not only men.

 

15 December 2018

Mr. Wawan from Ministry of Religion came to give us knowledge about how diverse is Indonesia. We have more than seventeen thousands islands, almost seven hundreds ethnicity, more than five hundreds local languages. He also point out that even in one religion there are more than one understanding. That’s why we have to be tolerant to not only other religion, but also other understanding. He said, nowadays people like to bash and bully other netizens blindly. For example, a pair of slippers with Arabic writing on both was posted on a Facebook page. The netizens who saw this thought it’s a verse of Quran, thus writing it on a pair of slippers is a degradation of Quran. They are enraged, assuming it’s Quran’s verse, but actually it’s only a writing of “shemaal” means left and “yameen” means right. They understand nothing yet they bash and do some hate speech blindly.

Then, he showed us some articles from famous publisher make reports with no certainty of how many deaths there are in a car bomb in Baghdad. But then, he played video of CCTV recording about a car bomb in Baghdad are actually fake. So a man walked towards a car, with no one around, perhaps to put a bomb. Then, he goes away with other car. After that, the car exploded and is in fire. Suddenly, some people running towards the scene, I thought they’re going to put out the fire but shockingly, they lay down on the ground. Suddenly an ambulance comes to the scene and the paramedics started to carry those who are laying on the ground with no injuries. The scene accidentally gets recorded by a local CCTV. Obviously, this is staged. There must be some reason why they staged it. One of the reasons could be to cause chaos around the world.

Mr. Wawan said that actually there is no religious conflict, but social conflict with religious nuance. Because if it is indeed religious conflict, then why many mosque and church in Indonesia built together side by side without any conflict?

He encourages us to become an active tolerant, not a passive tolerant. Means that when someone that has different religion or understanding getting harassed or bullied, we should help and protect him/her.

After his session ended, two educators from Mythos lab began their session. Mr. Priyank from India and his assistant, Ms. Emy will educate us how to promote peace through social media effectively. They divide us into five groups and assign us to make a video with peace message. So they gave us new smartphones and SIM cards. We all have different themes. My group’s theme is about extremism. Few of it based on my true story like what ISIS promise us if we move to their territory. So we discuss about it and make a draft of the script. The recording will begin tomorrow.

 

16 December 2018

This time, UN Women invited an ex-terrorist and a criminology lecturer. I’ve met and knew the ex-terrorist, Mr. Arif. He told us his touching experience how he realise his mistake and started to be a better person. Then the criminology lecturer (I forget his name, sorry) reveal us some ways for ISIS to recruit more people. Offline recruitment, online recruitment, and a mix of both. The location of the recruitment could be in educational institution, worship place, public facilities and online. Their targets are all ages.

After that, we continue the project with mythos lab. They help us at what angle we should take, correcting our acting and etc. For my group, we’ve got a problem. Some programs in the application we are supposed to use as editing the videos are not working. So we do the editing with two applications. We’re run out of time and didn’t perfected it. Only that we finished the video. And the problem we got is a change of pixel in the middle of the video so the video when in landscape view, suddenly in portrait view with the picture compressed. I’m not satisfied with it, but next time I’ll do better.

At night time, we eat together and some singing as the closing of the event, whilst me and some of us playing a game. I have a good memory with them all, and I hope to stay in touch with them. From this event, I feel that I’ve become braver to speak up when something is wrong.

This is our story, the beginning of our journey.

By: Syarafina Nailah