WRITTEN BY Sammi Lo

The KAS Global Issues Network headed off to Shanghai on January 19th, 2018 for the annual #GINAsia conference at Concordia International School in Shanghai. The theme of this years GINAsia conference was “A Place to Stand”, and more than 25 schools came together to present workshops about global issues of their choice. It was a fun, eye opening, and overwhelming experience.

Our workshop
In this big world that we live in, it can be difficult to imagine what to stand for, or how to cultivate or shape a place to take a stand. It can feel impossible to imagine real solutions for big problems on our planet. The global issue that KAS GIN Club chose to present was The Other Side of the Digital Divide: How Access to Communication and Information Technologies Affects Us All. The KAS GIN club used a short, fun game of jeopardy to let other students at the conference experience life without technology, so that the club could raise awareness for people that have limited access to the internet and electrical appliances. Students were able to leave the workshop knowing ways to overcome this issue.

Meeting Keynote speakers
On the trip to Shanghai, GIN members met people that had remarkable experiences, whether it being banning plastic bags or surviving wars. They heard stories from the phenomenal people that had been through life changing events. The inspirational anecdotes told by the speakers at the conference made it an even more treasurable experience.

Bye Bye Plastic Bags
5 years ago, when Melati Wijsen and Isabel Wijsen, two girls of ages 10 and 12, were walking on a beach by their house in Bali, they realised there were lots of plastic bags on the shore, they asked themselves one question “what are we going to do about it?”. What did they do about it? They banned plastic bags in Bali!

They first started by hosting beach cleaning events to encourage people to go to their nearest local beach to pick up trash and plastic products. They raised a lot of awareness for the issue by starting the bye bye plastic bag campaign, and ended up going from Bali to the world stage. The founder Isabel Wijsen said, “We are creating the biggest clean up Bali has ever seen. So in one single day, we’re going to call all NGOs, all communities, schools, students, youth, to clean up the entire coastline of Bali,”. Over the years, they met up with government officials to negotiate, and eventually convinced the Bali government to completely ban plastic bags by 2018.

At age of 10 and 12, they were still considered kids and most people around them didn’t believe that kids at that age could do something so profound such as “banning plastic bags completely”. Melati and Isabel proved them wrong. They said, “children are only 25 percent of human population, but they are 100% our future.” They also told us that we don’t need to start with a very ambitious goal, they never thought that they would be able to make such a huge impact in their country. They taught us that the small gestures of one person can turn into huge global social and economic movements which inspired us to bring this movement back to Taiwan. (KAS GIN club may or may not be working on something relating to this topic right now!)

Kim Phuc
Another keynote speaker at the conference was Kim Phuc. Kim Phuc was the girl from the picture of a naked girl running from an explosion during the Vietnam war. She was also a war survivor at age 9. She shared her story of witnessing death right in front of her, and how she never thought anyone would love her because of the burn marks the explosion had left on her body. She shared the story of how she forgave the man that dropped the napalm bomb on her once peaceful village, causing her to go through many many years of pain and suffering.

She told the audience that living life with hatred in our hearts was not a healthy way of living, and encouraged us to get rid of all the hatred in our life bit by bit, and learn to love our enemies.

Ishmael Beah

Ishmael Beah is a war survivor. In 1991, Rebels invaded Beah’s hometown, Mogbwemo, located in the Southern Province of Sierra Leone, and he was forced to flee. Separated from his family, he spent months wandering the country with a group of other boys. At the age of 12, he was forced to become a child soldier. Can you imagine yourself fighting war at age 12, or even any age? Ishmael shared his experience of suffering from hunger, loneliness and the danger of dying any moment and his reflections on conflict, war, and healing for our world. He witnessed the horrible side of war that only the unfortunate people see – the slow death and the striking pain. He shared his story of recovery and going back to school after the war. One extremely memorable thing he shared was that when he was in school, his classmates were always stressed about not being able to finish typing an essay, while he hand wrote one by hand. He said, “why are you worrying about not being able to finish your essay? There are far worse things in the world”. Hearing that from a war survivor and just hearing his story really gave the students a new perspective of looking at the challenges they face in daily life and made them realise that some of our challenges, aren’t serious challenges.

In the words of a GIN Club Member…
From a GIN member’s perspective, the trip to Shanghai was unforgettable. It’s not an everyday thing to get to meet such inspiring people that have such amazing stories to tell. This experience has inspired the KAS GIN club to make a change in the world. We started off as a club that just made workshops and hosted activities to raise awareness for global issues, but now we have been inspired to take a step towards making a real change in the world to solve significant global issues.