On Saturday, January 27th, 2018, a group of twelve students and two facilitators from the Liger Leadership Academy had run an event called “Gender Summit” where they tried to raise awareness about gender issues to students from different places around the country. I’m really glad that I had received this great opportunity to confidently share my opinion with everyone about this problem as well as getting to hear different aspects coming from students my age. This event comes with a lot of lessons about gender along with fun and educational activities that are really entertaining. We also get to eat free, delicious snacks and lunch as well.
One of my favorite activity of all is under the section called Violence and Power. Basically, at the start of the activity, one of the instructors will hand us a ball and a card. On the card, they had written some phrases that describe a type of person that we going to put ourselves in their shoes. For example, “Male street boy. 10 years old.” There’s a bin that is placed on the other end of the room opposite of where we stand. After everyone knows who they represented, another instructor will read different statements for example, “You don’t need to worry about food.” If it true for you, you will take a step forward, if not you remain at the same place. At the end, we will try to score the goal [bin] in front of us. And of course, the nearer you are to the bin, the more chance you can score it.
What I like about this activity is that it’s a physical activity where we’re using our whole body to involve in the game. It was a really fun game but powerful. This game had demonstrated that people nowadays who have a lot of power are enjoying their lives happily every single day while the other people are living under struggle and unable to accomplish their goal to get to where they want to be. Those powerful people are walking toward their goals easily without turning themselves back to help those poor people. In this contemporary world, power and money always play a role in bringing people to succeed.
This event made me think that solving gender issues is not impossible. But the most important thing to know is that it’s not easy, that is why we really need to raise awareness from now on. Before the event, I always think that some culture is really useless [sorry to say that], but now I realize that culture is really powerful and had made a huge impact on someone’s life. It sometimes mislead us. Moreover, I really want people to realize that to make this world a better place, it requires both genders, men, and women. If only men are doing the work, the world wouldn’t be any better. It really impacts how I view the importance of gender equity.
One quote from the event that is really powerful to me is “The people who have power aren’t using violence, the powerless one is.” From my understanding, this means that the people that aren’t having power are using violence because it’s the only way that they can gain power and use it over someone. And people you already have power, they don’t need use violence to get something they want.
I strongly believe that, through communication, we will be able to understand more about the issues as well as getting more people to look into this problem and together trying to raise awareness to more people and those dark aspects will slowly turn brighter and Gender Equity will happen to have in this world.
There’s also a website that was created by the twelve students who run the Gender Summit. I really hope you can check it out sometimes.
Here is a short video that basically describes what the whole day of Gender Summit looks like. Enjoy,