Zoey goes to Bandung

As you might know, I'm doing a part-time consultancy with the World Bank on a project that supports several large Indonesian NGOs in their work with marginalized groups.  In this case, marginalized groups are LGBT people, women's groups, indigenous communities that are geographically isolated, and youth.  It's a good project, and one where I can use my experience and learn about development issues in Indonesia all at the same time.  And I work with some really great people.  I got lucky!

Most of what I've been doing the last two months has been helping to re-work the project design for its second phase.  On Thursday, I got lucky and was asked to go to Bandung--a town three hours' drive from Jakarta--to observe a "National Workshop on Media Strategy for Advocacy for Marginalized Groups" (okay, it's a bad translation but it was a really fun bunch of people). The participants were from  about ten different organizations from all over the country, and all of them had been working with the project for more than a year so they knew each other quite well; by the time I got there, they were well into a great time.

I left Jakarta at 9am, set up my "office" in the back of the rental car, and got to Bandung in time for lunch.  I connected with one of the small groups (they were doing break outs) and we headed across the street for fried fish. It was a nice meal, but really.. I'm still not finding a lot of Indonesian food that really does it for me.  Glad they have lots of hot pepper here.

When we got back to the workshop, we met up with the rest of the groups and got started on the afternoon.  The warm-up was the funniest I think I've ever seen: the participants had to pair up and show each other "I love you" without words, touching whatever body part the facilitator named.  It didn't get as risky as I might have imagined.. but I laughed really really hard, and so did everyone else!

lips

nose

The rest of the day was good.. but really, when you're in a conference room with a bunch of people who have flipchart papers and markers in-hand, you could be anywhere in the world.  It's great to see people learning and sharing their expertise, still you can't help but wonder how many weddings have taken place in that room and why no one seems to have a conference room with windows.  On the up-side, I met people who are really doing things to make changes happen in Indonesia and my bahasa is getting much better.  In about a month, we'll see if more people are doing good things "with media for advocacy"!