June 2010 Projects: SD Peace Carnival (20 June)

About 2 months ago, I was asked if I would like to help out at the SD Peace Carnival. To be honest, when I first agreed, I thought it was like a “whole of NUSSD will participate” event. Yes, they did participate in various ways, but I didn’t know I would be placed in the planning team.

Anyway, Doris and I were selected as NUSSD’s YWD (young women division) representatives for this peace carnival. I missed my first meeting and attended the 2nd one, where we further discussed on what the carnival would be like for the “Economics” section where NUSSD was part of.

It was a really tough few meetings as such ideas were difficult.

Anyway, for those who aren’t sure what the peace carnival was about, ever year, the student division (SD) of Singapore Soka Association will come up with a “June Project”. Last year was the Rufu-Run (which I couldn’t attend due to SNCO) and this year, they decided (they meaning the excos) to do something based on Ikeda Sensei’s Peace Proposal (2009, which can be found here: ). The three topics are “Nuclear Weapons”, “Environment” and “Economics”. The goal was to let more people especially teenagers be more aware about the 3 topics.

I fell sick the week before the carnival and missed like 2 meetings that week. Not to mention, on the day of the carnival, SNCO had a rehearsal with the brass band for the upcoming performance. The day before, i was just so stressed I had no idea what to do but chant. Luckily, I smsed Melissa and Meow Ling who encouraged me and assured that such problems are common and that I should do my best in whichever meeting/event I choose to go.

So, in the morning, I went to SNCO to help them with their instruments and then went to HQ for the peace carnival after that.

Upon reaching there, I was tasked to help out with the “Retrench or Retain” booth. Basically, the whole section was a combined effort from NP, ITAC and NUS Student divisions. Our booths are all combined efforts (heard that the other levels were individual institution booths. Everyone did a great job though). There were 2 parts to the booths, a scenario and a game section. The scenarios are economics based (for our section) with no right answer for any choice you make at the scenario.

As I had just recovered, I was still quite weak that day. Kept coughing after trying to speak louder while explaining the scenario to the visitors. Luckily Melissa helped me take over the booth for a while and Ann Nee gave me a packet of Hacks sweets to make my throat feel a bit better (Thanks!) The trick I found was that I should speak at a comfortable volume and they will lean forwards to listen to you.

Oh yes. I was told off indirectly by the SD YMD chief (=x) coz I didn’t greet the visitors (which were the chiefs basically). So paiseh. But yea, I was still not in the right state of mind. Need to train properly too.

I had fun on that day though. Thanks to Huzaen who came down. He’s like the only person whom I invited who went down. Haha. He said he enjoyed the panel sharing (me too, as it was super informative).

I didn’t take much pictures as I was busy the whole day. However, my sis tagged me in one of the photos taken by a fellow Gakkai member. Haha. Quite nice.

Alright. This was my first “June Project”. Learnt a lot, gained a lot of knowledge and whole new friends as well. I thought this was a really good idea and maybe every year we should do something related to Sensei’s peace proposal.