Global Perspetives

How did this experience better help you understand:

1.Essential Understandings:

Throughout the progress of this project, I realized that sustainable development can only be achieved through the development of different perspectives. There were times when a group would clash with contradicting opinions, yet rather than simply avoiding them, we decided to build on these different opinions to come up with a reasonable solution. Moreover, we are now able to use systems thinking to map complex issues to identify the suitable change.

2. Critical Challenge:

Unsustainable income and a loss of indigenous culture in Panglong Fishing Village, Bintan, Indonesia

3. Through the Critical Challenge experience what did you learn about:

• Myself: I’ve noticed that sometimes, it was hard for me to tolerate other people’s opinion, nevertheless once I realized that, it became easier for me to compromise with my teammates.
• Working with other people, including your group members and other stakeholders: Everyone has different priorities, beliefs, and motives. I spotted that while working on the same project, people’s mentality would still diverge. For example, at times our stakeholders would question our actions: I figured the reason for that would be that they experienced the village better than we did, leading to such reaction.

4. How will you use what you learned in other situations?

I believe that what I’ve learned from this experience will go far with me in the future. As I said, I now understand where various perspectives come from, and again, I know how to compromise with these. I start thinking about the questions and the background that come previously to the people’s opinions; questions like, why? how? purpose?

5. The Critical Challenge: Impact

• What contribution did you make to the Critical Challenge project? My group, the marketing team, worked on creating a conceptual layout of a flexible brochure that captures the essence of The Island Foundation (TIF), and that communicates the importance of education and 21st-century skills to potential donors, volunteers, and supporters (our SMART goal). We researched the learning programmes and put the information gained in our brochure. We also, on the second trip, took professional pictures that will be displayed in our brochure as well.
• How did you impact the community? We did not make a big impact on the community just yet, since the brochures are not released yet, however, once the brochures will be released in its hardcopy as well as online, we believe it will bring the community more attention globally.

6. The Process

• In what ways did you make decisions and problems solve? Each team developed their own Action Plan, which captures the main goals the team has to achieve. The plan helped the teams organize their ideas and decide what action to take according to their planning. All team members contributed to the decision making to solve any problems that came in the way (i.e. unsuitable meeting time)
• Were there any differences between the initial plans and what you actually did? There were no big differences between our initial plans and the actions we ended up doing, except that we attended more meetings that were initially planned which, indeed, we found beneficial.
• What ideas do you have for improving any part of the Critical Challenge project? I believe that it would be very useful to record what we did on our blogs the nest time, so that we can look back at it and the next FIB class would have open access to see what we did.

What are the most significant challenges facing the Orang Suku Laut?

How are The Island Foundation programmes addressing these challenges?

Main challenges that Orang Suku Laut have to face are: lack of access to clean water, poor diet, and limited access to good medical expertise. In order to teach their students preventative health education, The Island Foundation started the organic farm where they constantly experiment with growing different vegetables and plants, introducing organic food to the people of Orang Suku Laut. Now, their students are able to identify organic and inorganic food. As for health care, the programme provides students with football classes, keeping the people active and showing them what team spirit is.

The programme that interests me the most would be craft entrepreneurship. I would love to help people of Orang Suku Laut understand how to start entrepreneurship from simply being crafty and creative. This is the area where I could help people learn about business and of how to start it effectively.

I personally think that genetics play a big role in gender identity. First of all, there is a physical difference in the brain of a male and a female. This difference affects hormones of a girl and a boy, therefore influencing their behavior. Milton Diamond, the biologist said, “just as animals are born with an instinctive set of behaviors, either act like a male or a  female, and so are humans.” It is true that our society influences the way people see themselves (male/female), by setting stereotypes on their population. Although people are easily affected by their environment, in my opinion, genetics override the influence of nurture.