Image above taken by Ben Palliyaguru.
UN day is a day in school which is dedicated annually to the cherishing of our school’s well-known motto, “Unity in Diversity”. Every year the OSC community comes to school dressed in their traditional clothes of their nationalities. This year on the 4th of October we saw a stunning variety of colors and garb representing more than 50 nations. I myself wore my “Baju Melayu” which is the traditional male clothing of Malaysia. From the beginning of the day, a long procession plays out starting from the gathering of all our grade groups on the outdoor basketball court. We then filed ourselves into the gym which was decorated with the dozens of flags that fluttered around the edge of the room. As a history student in DP1, I was assigned to read out one of the declarations of human rights during this procession in the gym of which I chose to say in Malay. The article I read aloud was article 26 about the right to education and the compulsory of elementary school.
Image taken by Calvin Ng.
After this event, we continued onwards to our assigned classrooms where we each had sessions relating to the values of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This year’s theme was related to the rights of women. In the session I participated in, we worked on unravelling the phenomenon that is the assumptions and misconceptions society has built around the idea of how a woman is supposed to act in a vocational setting or even which professions women normally have. An interesting activity that was performed was the use of charades of professions with people of the opposite sexes to what would normally be considered a vocation that is fit for them. In this way, as audiences, we were challenged to contradict the mainstream notion of how male workers have “masculine” jobs and female workers “feminine” jobs.
Image taken by Marco Arturo Rincon Jimenez.
In a separate part of this session, the participants, including myself, were formed into groups to prepare a poster of a chosen charity organization which advocates for the rights of women, among other things. Our group was assigned the organization of Plan International, an independent development and humanitarian group working in 71 countries around the world in the continents of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. These posters were to be put up on the bulletin boards around the campus to raise awareness about these organizations and their work. This made it vital for my group to create an easily readable poster with good usage of visuals and color to attract readers and keep them engaged. To emphasize the extent of the organization’s reach, a map of the world was drawn and colored with all the nations that have are undergoing projects by Plan International. Then there were other sections to highlight what the organization was for, how it originated, and the values they vowed to uphold. These values included supporting education, youth activism, sexual and health rights, and teaching skills and work for vocations. All in all, the poster has been wonderfully produced, as seen below, and our group hopes that we can pass on the knowledge of our research to anybody who might pass by the poster.
Image taken by Kenji Tan.