These are original articles that have not been submitted to external media.

Social protection monitor: Indonesia, February 2024

Summaries below were produced to capture the overall dynamics of Indonesia’s social protection issues. For professional use, please refer to the original articles in Indonesian. The summaries may contain errors and misinterpretations. Read more

Civil G8 Dialogue

On April 23rd and 24th, “Civil G8 Dialogue” took place in Kyoto, to put forward civil society perspectives on the issues on the official agenda of the G8 Hokkaido Toyako Summit. I worked part time and joined it as well. That was my first international conference ever.

Grasmere

Having been running straight toward one goal for the past years, I am now standing at the starting point. Since I got involved in an NGO based in Japan, my concern about poverty reduction and international development has started to grow up. Particularly, studying at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) was one of the best choices I had ever made. Soon after receiving my degree in Law and leaving the Kagawa University, I was provided great opportunities to study a number of fresh issues and cutting-edge approaches on an area of poverty reduction, with my passionate colleague from all over the world. Now, I am at the starting point of my career as a poverty reduction specialist.

I am now on holiday at a small village in the Northern England, and leaving for Cambodia on September 25th. My first work as a professional will be with the International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC) at the International Labour Organisation (ILO). I will have been working in Phnom Penh until the middle of March 2010. Without doubt, this is a challenging mission for me; therefore, I will gain the largest input if I can complete it at the end.
As William Wordsworth used to love a little village, Grasmere, I enjoy peaceful atmosphere in this neighbour village, Windermere. Although the wind makes feel a little cold, it will passionate me to become a professional more and more.

Restart from Brighton

“Living more cheaply”

Since arriving at Brighton, the UK, I have slightly got used to a different life. As being told before, I have found the higher prices of everything encouraging me not to buy many things at first. But you can live withought buying such expensive stuffs, of course. Obviously, some stores sell staple items cheaper and others offer papers or books with more reasonable prices, which is great. For example, I buy a newspaper, THE TIMES, for 25p out of 70p everyday and have had a whole bread for 10p and eggs for free. It is absolutely important to know where to buy what you want.

By the way, I have found a great news in the paper today, which says ‘Cheaper groceries despite soaring costs’. Everything is going well.

Education

“What’s education”

Today was the last day for me to teach kids at an institute where I was working for 3 months. My students were almost 30; 10 to 14 years old, and none of them were kinds of stupid. All of them have both good abilities and weak points. I have never said, “Don’t do that!” or “Do that as I said!” although some co-workers told their kids like that. But there is a question. ‘How do you know whether you are right or your kids are right?’

When I taught one of my pupils how blood ran inside us, he told me, “It is similar to our society y. There are many elders being thrown away after retiring while the younger are working hard.” He thought fresh bloods as younger people and old bloods thorown out of bodies as older people.

My boss thoughts he was not good at studying but I didn’t. In fact, it was not easy to teach and make him concentrate. Now we have to think about the reason why it was difficult. The thing is he had a lot of questions and interests everytime and wanted to ask those. He had his own ideas. I love answering those.

Anyway, this work has given me some ideas on education. Thanks and good luck to my kids.

2 years ago

Last weekend, I went to see my old friends in Tokyo after Yokohama for a meeting called ‘Student Summit’. One of my friends who I really missed was not there at that time, but I enjoyed having plenty of kimchi stew and talking to them about our future, goals and love stories during the whole night.

Japanese Youth Meets in Shikoku for Development

We had a big event in Ehime. Almost 40 students who were interested in environment, international issues or students organisation itself gathered and stayed for the past three days in Rainbow Highland there. We shared our experiences and information of volunteer organisations members joined. This extremely fantastic event motivated all of us.

Happy new year

Happy new year!

Now I am in my home town with my family and have not been here for a year. During the last year, there were a lot of things happened around me. Those do not just mean I went to many foreign countries and saw hundreds of new friends, but also those changed my way to think about my future or life. Everybody I met gave me different effects. I would like to keep in touch with them. I hope all of them have happy new year.

Ippei

The final day of 2007

Getting at home town at the final day of the year, there are a lot to do in my home. To clean the rooms of our house is my work every year.

At the 31th of December, many Japanese look back on their lives of last year. To me, this year was forgettable. I have got heaps of friends from the whole world and experienced a lot of differences. Although it is necessary for me to improve my English, I can let somebody understand me in English at least, which is fantastic.

I would like to say that everything happened in 2007 was not my goal. It was a part of my scenario of my life. What I need to do in 2008 is to play a role for this story.

Thank you for reading this and I hope to see you next year.