“YOUTHS BUILDING A BETTER TOMORROW”

During the weekend of June 2nd and 3rd 2007, the motions of a busy Kuala Lumpur continued its ever-fervent pace. But, within a conference room at the eleventh floor of Menara Prudential, old frontiers were being broken and new enlightenments established! Ten selected young facilitators, with a coach no other than Aunty Eng Eng herself, were conducting the Young Leader International’s Youth-for-Youth Self-Esteem and Confidence program for around thirty underprivileged participants. The goal of the program, as its name should suggest, was –and still is– to encourage the growth of self-esteem and confidence in these less fortunate individuals, while also providing an invaluable experience for the facilitators.

For an event conducted primarily by teenagers who were debatably still relatively inexperienced in this field, the two-day sessions took of very smoothly. Perhaps to most of the facilitators’ surprise and cherishing, the underprivileged participants –or “friends”, as everyone had come to call each other– offered their utmost of support and interest, without which the program probably could not have been so wholesomely knit. Games were played, speeches made, ice-breakers… well… broken, and hearts contented.

Although the rightful name of this event had been “Self-Esteem and Confidence”, what happened were really much, much more: there, a miniature, but remarkable society was, for a time, created; a society where we all, as humans, stood on equal grounds, breaking old racial barriers and over-individualisms, truly defining the phrase “a better tomorrow”...

Reported by,

Tan Zu Puayen, 17 years old

 
 
 
 
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