FROM ITALY TO INDONESIA: A WORLD EXCHANGE

Giulio participated in a Study Visit to Indonesia organized by Associazione Kora and Initiative et Développement Citoyen and hosted by GREAT Indonesia from August 17 to September 17, 2017, as part of the World Exchange project funded by the Erasmus+ program. Among the objectives of the Study Visit, the exchange of methods for the organization of projects with young people and the preparation and animation of the international exchange “Our Culture”.

This is his story!

Premise: I’ve been wanting to go to Indonesia since my first year of grad school. I also wanted to apply for a scholarship of about three months, to study Indonesian art, music and culture – which are very cool.

Space-time jump: 2 years after graduation and various experiences, I leave for an EVS, European Voluntary Service, in France. So I get in touch with people and organizations that carry out amazing projects, like the one I’m about to describe.

In summary, World Exchange is a project that brings together 6 non-profits (3 European and 3 Asian) to exchange methods on how to organize projects for young people, on the model of international Erasmus+ exchanges, or workcamps.

To exchange these methods, obviously, we don’t skype or send each other letters: we meet, we plan projects to manage together and during these projects we train young people to work with young people. Like me, who had some experience in exchanges and Erasmus+ projects and wanted to learn more.

My traveling companion Julia and I left, with an I (I won’t tell you the trouble we had to go through when we introduced ourselves: “Giulio and Julia” became at best “Julio and Giulia”).

We were picked up at the airport by Ben, project manager for GREAT, the Indonesian organization that was hosting us. From the car, in the traffic, we see a rather outrageous amount of mopeds, each with a number of people on them that varies from 1 to 4.

We arrive at GREAT’s office/headquarters/home in Semarang, a charming town in the Central Java region on the island of Java, that’s right.

The room is cool, the stairs to get there an Indiana Jones movie.

The next day we leave immediately for the first workcamp in another town, Blora, a couple of hours drive away. The workcamp is about reading, so Julia and I prepare an inspirational powerpoint to make young Indonesian students aware of the importance of reading.

I’ll try to give you a sense of what these first 3 days were like this way: take a ton of kaleidoscopes and throw them into a tornado, then jump in. It was a deep dive into Indonesian culture, we were welcomed into a local family (legendary Gundalas!), volunteered with the kids led by the wonderful group leader Dian, visited beautiful places, attended traditional music concerts, ate traditional food, participated in carnivals and religious festivals, were mistaken for experts in renewable engineering, and one morning we woke up at 5 am to go work out with the neighborhood residents to the beat of the hottest Javanese hits.

Back in Semarang, we go to visit the place that would host the international exchange, have several meetings to finalize the details and divide up the activities, and well in our free time of course we take a look around.

Meanwhile. The food in Indonesia is delicious. And cheappy. And it’s very common to go and eat in one of the little holes along the streets, which serve typical dishes (fried rice with meat, fish, vegetables, noodles, fried food, tempeh, fruit) at – I swear – less than the cost of a coffee in Italy.

The places: breathtaking. From Semarang we went to Yogjakarta, the cultural capital of Central Java, we watched a shadow theater show with a live gamelan orchestra, we rented a small motorcycle (7 euros a day and a sunburn) and we went to the beach and to the temple complex of Prambanan. These were our faces after 4 hours of driving under the tropical sun:

This is the shadow theater show:

But there were several appetizing places in Semarang as well, first and foremost Rainbow Village, a former slum that has been entirely repainted and enhanced by a host of artists and has become a tourist attraction:

But let’s come to the exchange. It lasted one week and involved 24 young people from Indonesia, Malaysia and Cambodia. The theme was culture, in the sense of: what can we do to enhance our traditions and make sure they are not lost?

We had prepared sessions for participants to think about culture and traditions (role-playing, visits, discussions, debates), and each group prepared workshops on local traditions of their country, such as an Indonesian martial art, making banana leaf crafts, or using the krama, a scarf that they use as a

• scarf
• fashion accessory
• headgear to protect themselves from the sun
• moistened handkerchief to protect themselves from the heat
• towel to dry sweat
• shopping bag
• cloth to collect vegetables and fruit
• pareo

and so on and so forth.

During the course of the project, the theme of the exchange has… let’s say slightly changed. Because some of the traditions or values of the generations preceding ours, both in Europe and in Southeast Asia, are now antiquated, participants were able to express their critical issues through discussion and encounters with others. My personal and positive culture shock was to see the open-mindedness and curiosity of young people in Southeast Asia in dealing with sensitive issues, such as gender equality between men and women, LGBT rights, questioning of religious values, for example on marriage or parental authority.

Now it would be nice to end this testimony with a catch phrase, something that opens the heart and invites to action, that enhances the Erasmus+ projects that give the opportunity to learn and open the mind to everyone, even to young people who come from disadvantaged backgrounds (at the exchange there was a boy of 20 years who had never been out of his village!).

But it’s impossible to convey all the emotions I felt during this month in Indonesia and encapsulate them in a paragraph, so I’ll just leave you with the name of the exchange, “Our Culture”, to maybe make you think about the fact that we are the ones who shape the culture we inhabit, and so let’s be careful and have fun doing it, because our culture can intertwine with others, adapt to times and people, open up and improve the life of a community…. becoming a culture open to all.

Our culture.