(In January 2011, and thanks to the ICRC Young Reporter Competition, I had the fortune of visiting the ICRC mission in the Philippines to report on the situation of youth. This post is part of a series I wrote on this visit. Click here to see the rest of the posts.)
In 2007, I was an 11th year high school student, and I found very little usefulness in the things I was doing to get a high school diploma. Dissecting brains and learning the properties of chemical elements was fun, interesting at its best; however, like a good chunk of the people who go through our version of high school, I didn’t find meaningful knowledge through those practices, I thought (and that hasn’t changed, if I can be honest).
Maybe it is because I found most of it uninteresting that I can still clearly remember the things that made my high school stay more bearable, academically speaking. It was in 2007 that I was recording in my mind one of the most vivid memories I have to date, all on a Friday night-Saturday morning. At home. At my desk. I was working furiously on a handbook to be used by junior high school kids to debate intellectual property and the protection of tangible cultural heritage.
I wasn’t on a deadline, on stimulants, or going through an episode of insomnia. I wasn’t waiting for friends to send me drunk texts to laugh at either. It was just me and my goal: to make topics as complicated but as fascinating as those of the politics of culture easy for 13-to-15-year-olds to understand and debate on.
Even cynical me back then knew that I was on to something. No, not the creation of outstandingly enlightening content or anything like that. I just knew it was rare for something like that to keep me away from my pillow. “I could do this for a living, I think. I’d enjoy it”.
Four years later, I am sitting on a plane to Tokyo. In a few hours I will be arriving to Manila to visit the ICRC mission in the Philippines. The purpose: to create materials based on this experience to raise awareness on the role of youth in situations of conflict, and on the Red Cross and Red Crescent movement.
Thanks to the ICRC for this opportunity; to Global Changemakers for letting me find out about it, and to the local heroes of Mexico City Model UN who got me started in this game. Salamat po!!
Oh, and just to create a contrast with the glory of those paragraphs I just wrote, here is a picture of me (courtesy of illuminarti) at the very beginning of the journey.
Thank you for your attention.