Cheenky! Online

I am now here at the Kansai International Airport, waiting for the boarding call for the flight back to the Philippines. The week-long Asia and the Pacific Youth Camp for Sustainable Development in Kyoto has finally ended. I would say that i am looking forward to going home now but i am definitely bringing home fond memories and precious insights from this experience.

Firstly, it amazes me how diverse backgrounds and cultural differences can be set aside when topic for discussion by our group (namely Heng Dyna from Cambodia, Jay Shah from India, Kavindra Nand from Fiji Islands, Saba Majeed from Pakistan and Terumi Ishii from Japan) is stirred towards love and relationship. We may be living miles apart from each other, but universal truths gain prominence eventually with sometimes very amusing cultural variation.

Don’t get me wrong. Of course, in fairness to our sponsoring institution, we did spend the week talking mostly about the youth’s viewpoints to sustainable development. I have to admit I am more curious about how full-time students view sustainable development and what actions they plan to take to achieve it. Since I know I have an NGO orientation more than that of a student, I try to restrain myself during discussion. But I did learn a lot from this demographic and their views. And I am very very proud of my group’s final output which hopefully will be published together with our winning essays.

Our collective output (which by the way was under the theme ‘Industry and Infrastructure’) was presented by moi (first part) and Saba (second part) during the Forum held in Kyoto University. It was well-attended by Japanese university students, professors and concerned citizens of Kyoto.

Biases aside, I really think our group was the best! And to think that I was originally part of the group that will work on environmental sustainability.

During the forum itself, I preferred to give the full-time students the chance to really express their views but i was able to say some of my experiences in my NGO work for Partnership for Clean Air when the question about social activism was raised. It was a good thing too since the person who asked the question was really interested about my work and, i later found out, he is also doing something similar with a UNEP-supported network. Very appropriate for future collaborations

One thing that leaves a bad taste in my mouth about the whole event was the fact that, in one of our plenary discussions within the whole group to finalize our declaration, our moderator who IS a Filipina professor contradicted me outrightly when I raised a point about the difficulty of sustaining the environmental agenda if the poverty issue is not addressed first. It was just so wrong for her to do that! She said we should stop making excuses. Duh? I was just trying to make the students have a perspective on what the reality is for developing countries so I raised the example of daily wage workers thinking only about how to get their next meal or the irony of teaching a kid living in the Payatas dumpsite about ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.’ We were on the topic of individual making choices to benefit the environment so I pointed out that choice for these people would even be a luxury they can’t afford so the underlying issue of poverty is definitely part and parcel of our discussion. I just felt that the students need to be in touch with reality and not be too theoretical with tackling the sustainable development issue. Anyway, my point was validated by the ADB representatives as well as by some audiences during the Forum itself on 17 March. It was just so sad that even during international forum, Filipinos would contradict each other. I mean, is this the crab mentality that we Filipinos are so notoriously branded of? =(

I really regret having to experience that. Nothing personal about the professor but it was just disappointing in a way. Everything else was all-good for me though. The weather didn’t bother me as much as it did during my first few days in Japan (it was so cold, in some days it was even snowing!). All in all, it was a hectic but very meaningful(!) Kyoto trip for me =)

Check out our group pic:

This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 3:33 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.