Refugees SG
30,000 refugees of the Mae La camp on the Thai-Burma border welcome the Thai King
Managed to get the Refugees SG project underway, have been working to put together the exhibition materials, petition and website together for the 3-school exhibition which will be within the next two weeks. Personally very excited with this project even though the scope is much smaller than I expected it to be, because it represents a new working model I’m experimenting with.
Refugees SG was born out of a workshop I gave at the UNAS Seminar 2007 sometime in May, where I showed them a video of Hmong refugees (see here- warning: gruesome images). After the seminar, I got the contacts of those who attended and asked who among them were interested in organizing an exhibition in their schools, in an effort to get signatories for a petition to ASEAN, and also to raise awareness about an issue we hardly hear about. The number was initially 8 JCs, then it dwindled to 5, then to the present day 3. However, it is an interesting test case of how a collaborative effort can succeed with the aid of the internet- the group of 10 or so have not met face to face yet (apart from during the seminar).
The exhibition should be held in the next 2 weeks in TJC (Rishik), IJC (Zhong Jie), and RJC- will be interested to see how it works out. Hopefully, other schools will come forward and use the “exhibition package” to set up an exhibit in their own schools, and create some pressure on governments to do something about it.
Have been fortunate to work with the team of very talented and dedicated individuals like those mentioned above- and not to forget my own RJ team of people, and Jared, who encouraged this project. They have had the initiative and talent to work around problems in their own schools, and create a project out of nothing. Am very interested to meet them when we come to do the exhibition boards. Am hoping to find some way to get them credit in their testimonials through UNAS or something, in order to reflect their contributions to this project.
