For my Project Week, my group decided to go to Jakarta under Jakarta Street Kids (JSK). Our trip covered two CAS aspects: creativity and service, but mainly service. To say it impacted us is an understatement, because of the different events we’d witnessed during our stay in Jakarta.
Before the service with XSProject, our group visited a museum in Jakarta called Taman Mini, where we learned about the historical culture of Indonesia, showcasing the historical household items, different types of housing, traditions.
Taman Mini wasn’t just a museum, but a culture park that showcased every aspect of the Indonesian culture. From the indigenous species that live here to the type of houses from the 18th century to present, Taman Mini had it all. The first thing that visitors see in the museum are the different traditional costumes, from different parts of Indonesia, and even the history behind it. Out of the entire tour in Taman Mini, this had to be my favourite part.
We were told that the costumes the mannequins were wearing were genuine traditional costumes from history, and yet, they look so well maintained. Before this, I wasn’t aware that Indonesia had such a variety of traditional costumes, and to see all of them lined up was so intriguing.
The remaining two levels of the museum featured the different cultural traditions that most Indonesians celebrate, for example, a 7 month pregnancy tradition called a Mitoni ceremony, a ritual for the safe passage of a woman’s first seven months of pregnancy, (7 bulanan). Mitoni comes from the Javanese word ‘pitu’ or seven. Sungkeman is when both the expecting mum and dad ask forgiveness from their parents in order to have a smooth and healthy pregnancy journey until labor.
I came into the museum with an open mind, wanting to learn and understand more about the Indonesian culture (because Malaysia and Indonesia have very close roots with each other) My main goal was to go out learning something I didn’t know, and for me, that was specifically the 7 month pregnancy tradition. For some reason, that was the display that stuck out to me the most, as I had never heard of such a tradition in my life. I’m glad that I was able to experience and learn different cultures of the world and have my horizons expanded!
One major learning outcome from this experience is LO 3: Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience. Taman Mini is a very big culture park, and in order for us to get the most out of it with minimal time wasted, we had to plan ahead of our route and what we’d do. This included collaboration from all of our members, as we wanted to make sure everyone was satisfied with our schedule and if there were any problems, we could work around it. We even planned to use the pay-as-you-go go-kart to go around Taman Mini to save time (and it wasn’t that expensive anyway!)
