AYC, Day 3


29th July 2010

This morning, I woke up, suprisingly wide awake. After sleeping a bit late, and going through the guilt (luckily, I've been sincerly forgiven), I was determined to prove myself to day, at least enough to make up for my mistake.

The morning was met with a funny incident. Room 314, Erico and Son (Vietnamese YDL), simply would not wake up. Morning calls, extra phone calls, ringing the bell and even excessive knocking, were turned into futile attempts.

We had a delightful breakfast, scrambled eggs, sausages and some kind of cake. It filled up my fueltank, and we waited in the lobby to get ready. We waited for a long time. When the van came really late from the appointed time.

I was a bit sleepy, though I tried to keep my eyes wide open. So when Yudhi said to me, "I think you're going to really like today," my brain lagged in giving a response. I then realized I had forgotten what we were supposed to do this morning.

So when we pulled up in front of the building of Singapore's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I practically stopped breathing for a few seconds.

Wearing our school uniform as this was a formal event. Mr Ong Keng Yong, was the current Minister of Foreign Affairs and the former Secretariat Genderal for ASEAN.

We had a seminar/lecture about ASEAN from the history to the cuurent problems and the solutions by using the ASEAN way. It was a bit boring, and since I was sleepy I wasn't completely focused. But seeing the discussion between the other delegates and Mr Ong gave me new insight and knowledge.

Mr Ong bought us McDonalds burger and coke and pizza-that-smelled-like-takoyaki. He was very kind to us and friendly as well. After that, we came back into the building's press room and "graduated". We were given a certificate by Mr Ong and Mr Chu that was proof that we had competed our YDL Training Camp.

After that we went back to SMa, which is like an institute, to have another lecture. This time it was being presented by Mr Chu, who is the founder of the GYCi, and it was entitled, "The Essence of Leadership."


It was a really great lecture. Mr Chu brought humour to the presentation while still giving the necessary lessons we could utilize.

After that, we had a 30 minute break which was followed by another presentation.

This one was about how to be a facilitator, how to facilitate a group discussion, sort of direct it. The speaker was a good friend of Mr Chu. His name was Augustine Ashtuvan, and he is a senior journalist, who is currently working on Channel News Asia. He was a really great guy, bringing more humour, and stories about his many experiences travelling around the ASEAN countries as part of his job.

After that we went back to the hotel for a quick brief about tomorrow's schedule. But unfortunately, the other delegates form Indonesia had a bit of a delay.

At around 8.30 PM, their vans arrived. What happened next was sort of a blur. Everyone was hugging and saying hello and and high-fiveing so much, that we were causing a bit of a riot.

We were rebriefed, announcing the details to the other delegates. We were also given a bit of morbid news, which really set my mood down. But it only motivated me to start giving my best even more.

So I decided to start by posting a blogpost early tonight. Sasha suggested that we, the Writing Club members, meet up to do our blogs together.



But when I ran into the other delegates, most of them wanted to go around Orchard Road, I was stunned. I suggested that they not go tonight and to rest up. They listened to reason, and decided not to go.


We ended up all gathering (read: nge-rumpi) in room 246, the room where Toby, Edwin and Kenny were setting up camp for the entire convention.

We were joking around, talking, but we were still able to keep the noise to a minimum. I was chatting with my best friend and little sister for a while but when I started getting serious on my blogpost, the batteries on my laptop was about to run out. I ran to Gori's room next door to get the charger and mouse but realized the original 2-pronged adaptor was gone.

Apparently Gori left in in his old room, in room 314 so I ran back to Cathy and Clara's current room to grab the adaptor and ran into Yudhi. He was working on a presentation for tomorrow on the topic, "Can ASEANs think?" and asked for my assistance.

Once I arranged my things, I went back to his room. When he prompted me for my opinion, my mind was already beggining to shut down. It was late and I was very tired.

But luckily, I had enough brain-juice to come up with one last idea: with everyone already gathered up back upstairs, why don't we discuss the issue with them?

So we moved our base of operations back to room 426, and calmed everyone down. We had a great discussion, in my opinion. I sort of became the facilitator, implementing the lessons we learned today, and the opinions that came out really gave me some food for thought.

I volunteered to be the speakear and honestly, at such short notice, I'm helluva lot scared. Let's just hope that this improptu presentation will work out nicely.

--Karin Novelia

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