I'll try to pick up from where I left off and as far back as I can remember, I'll start with my Journey to Johor Bahru. For those of you who don't know where Johor Bahru, I think its time you looked at a map. It goes something like this:
So I get told that I have to make it to UTM. I thought that most of the universities are located around the KL area like UM and UUM etc. I know that UKM is a little bit outside Kuala Lumpur but its still relatively close....I guess. I thought getting to UTM was going to be a piece of cake.
It's not. I mistook UITM for UTM. THEY ALL SOUND THE SAME!
And Apparently they are not.
Anyways, 5 hours down the track I'm in Johor Bahru.
I'm attending a conference for Exchange participants. Its abbreviated to EPIC.
EPIC was intense. There were a lot of activities to do and there were so many people. The UTM OC were amazing. They put up with my intense whining about my lack of sleep and somewhere along the lines of orange toilet paper. (I'll get to that later. It has something to do with lack of sleep and a bunch of Exchange participants and a packet of instant noodle.)
Moving on about Johor Bahru, we had plenty of bonding time through playing cross cultural simulations and learning how to negotiate with our peers to achieve a certain goal. It was really fun. I remember the best part about it was asking a girl from Beijing about Beijing opera. I have always grown up with my mother listening to it and I have never appreciated it. I have always thought it was my mother's way of tormenting me as I waited eagerly for my turn with the T.V
Much appreciation was gained about the amount of training and effort put into Beijing Opera. The girl that I met also shared a great passion for Lord of the Rings. (She now resides in New Zealand!) I guess I won't be treating my mother's indulgence for Beijing opera as a sick sense of torture for me anymore!
I met a lot of people from around the world and from my own country Australia with a tantalising sense of 6 degrees of separation.
I learnt a lot about Kazakhstan and apparently horse meat is tasty. I wouldn't know but after meeting a few people from Kazakhstan, (they are called Kazakhs) I really want to go. The best part about global village is that it opened my eyes to see the world in a different light. I thought of places I would never have considered to travel such as Nigeria.
Meeting others from around the world showed me that there are some things that can unite us and one thing that cannot be denied is our love for dancing horribly.
I promised that I would get to the story about the orange toilet paper roll. I woke up one morning to go the bathroom only to be weirded out by an orange coloured toilet paper roll. I was too shy to ask my new room mates why the toilet paper was orange so I pretended that there was nothing strange in the bathroom. I discovered 1 week later that someone had dropped the roll into the instant noodle after a confrontation about seafood flavouring.
Moving on to HIV, I was lucky to hear about discrimination on people who are HIV positive. A lady came o Johor Bharu with an incredibly moving story. The thing about HIV is that there is no such thing as a lucky guess. You can't tell who is positive and who is not.
She was from Singapore and she was teaching English at University level and after falling ill for 3 months she went to the Doctor. The Dr then recommended that she get tested for HIV as her immune system was not functioning at full potential. She got tested and found out that she was positive in the end. She learned months later that she had contracted it from her husband who had been a drug user in the past, which she had no knowledge about.
She had to face discrimination from her own family, her workplace and her husband left her with 4 kids to look after.
Her boss had told her to resign as she was posing as a health threat to the students which is ABSOLUTE BOLLOCKS. HIV is not like Tuberculosis and cannot be airborne. It can only be transmitted through body fluids. I was shocked to hear how uneducated her boss was about the subject.
Her family had disowned her and abandoned her and she cried as she told the story. I found most upsetting was the fact that its not the the virus that kills them, its the abandonment from society and the discrimination.
I think another factor is fear. People are afraid of what they don't know and what I learned at the end of it was that many people know very little about HIV/AIDS. They know that it is bad but they don't know beyond surface level.
For more information, please look it up in your own time.
Do yourself a favour and to those around you and read up on HIV/AIDS. They are people just like you and there is hope as long as you believe there is. I know I'm being corny and cheesy again but seriously. Awareness is the way to go. I guess that's part of my job here.
Give those that are affected our love and support.
Signing off: Lily Cheng xoxox
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