Sticking to Your Movement Why Consistency Matters
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when i was 11 years old
i co-founded a non-governmental
organization with my mother
called fey in english
that translates to phase home or phase
house
and our mission was simple
we wanted to eradicate child trafficking
in indonesia through peer-to-peer
education
the idea was that with increasing youth
participation there would be a decrease
in youth exploitation and trafficking
throughout the country or at least
in their communities
at 11 years old i had one strong
belief that change
long lasting change would only be
possible
through grassroots impact emerging
from youth empowerment it was a big
belief i know but
six year long story short rumafei grew
to become an organization i am
extraordinarily proud of
to become an organization that has a
safe house a shelter
for victims of sexual abuse and
exploitation
in indonesia
when i was asked to speak at tedx i
wasn’t so sure where i wanted to start
with the story
see when people hear this whole
background about starting rumafei the
first question they ask
is why why did you start rumafei
so young and while that’s definitely a
valid question that i can and will
answer
later on usually when people ask
why the answer they’re looking for lies
in the how question
not how i started i doubt there are many
people who are quite interested
in the legalities of starting an ngo
but how i stayed so consistent
and committed see this took me quite a
long time to realize
because i’m the type of person who
thinks initiative is everything
as long as you’re proactive as long as
you start something
life will take it out of your hands and
it will just
grow but like a seed
our ideas and our initiatives need
water need to grow
so i did a little bit of an evaluation
of the past six years
i will be upfront and say that i am 17
years old
i don’t know much and i’m still learning
so
many things
but why did i stay so consistent boiled
down to
one big point and it was that i found
myself working
for something bigger than me
and i know that sounds like such an icky
kind of concept that
when you say bigger than yourself it
sounds like you’re supposed to go to
another
destitute third world country other than
you know our own
and serve the people there and somehow
find ourselves while we do that and
while
there is some sort of truth in that
sentiment usually we have to look
closer to home see i’ve always been a
big believer
in the idea that purpose isn’t about
what you can get but about what you can
give to other people
and so when i realized that it was that
i found myself
working for something bigger than me i
did little three little bullet points
after
what was it about that concept that made
me committed
number one i knew
how to mobilize the resources i had
number two
i knew my impact and number three
i knew or at least i’m learning to take
a break
but the one i want to emphasize most is
know
your impact because consistency won’t
happen if you don’t know
how important the work that you do is i
want to take you back
before 2013 before the start of mafe
before i ever had this t-shirt
printed i grew up in a family that
emphasized social responsibility that i
had
a responsibility not as a citizen not as
a girl but as
a human being to do something bigger
to do something for others i never took
my own initiative i never was committed
or particularly
unique in that sense but when i learned
about child trafficking
i was terrified because i had grown up
learning about all these different types
of social justice
issue and here was this one that i had
never heard of and do you know why
because we are scared to talk about
issues like child prostitution child
sexual
abuse and reproductive health because it
is uncomfortable for us
even though 40 to 70 000 children are
trafficked every
single year in indonesia 43.5 percent
of victims of sexual exploitation from
all ages are below
14 years old and we don’t talk about
that we don’t like to hear that because
it makes us uncomfortable
i sent a couple handwritten letters to
activists ngos government officials even
some actors and actresses asking them
if i could become some sort of mini
volunteer in their organizations
i didn’t get many replies but the ones
that did
opened some amazing doors for me to be a
little volunteer to understand more
about this issue
and i saw one problem
and it was that they were adults and
there was this generational gap that
they weren’t even
trying to bridge you see
i’m generation zed a lot of the people
who worked in these organizations
were either baby boomers or gen x and
while that might not
mean a lot of things to some of you guys
it meant a lot to these kids because it
meant that they
couldn’t connect they didn’t feel good
confiding in these people
and so what happened was a little
discussion group
a small one me my friends
other friends from other communities and
we brought in a legal advocate or an
activist and they talked about things
that the kids might not feel comfortable
talking about
i nudged them if the lady said something
funny
but there was real change in the focus
groups that we had
the kids were more comfortable to ask
questions
six seven months after we started
i was nine or ten i want to say
one of the girls comes and
you know asks if we can talk i don’t
think anything of it because i think you
know it’s just
a normal conversation and she tells me
she looks at me in the eye and i’ll
never forget that she says
my grandfather has been touching me
i know with the way the story is going
you all know where
what happened but i didn’t i’m not a
counselor not a therapist not a
psychiatrist i don’t know anything
about this except from what i’ve heard
from my mentors i’m only
a facilitator i’m not a teacher and i
don’t
know what to do
she is nine years old and her
grandfather has been touching her for as
long
as she can remember
molesting her
i don’t want to get into the case too
much
but she asked me to come with her to
talk to the legal advocate we worked
with we
you know there was a case and we found
her counselor and
it was okay her parents luckily
were terrified not all cases are like
these
i remember going home that night and
crying to my mom and asking why did she
tell me a selfish part of me
wanted her to take it back so i didn’t
have to remember that happening because
i was nine years old i didn’t need to
remember or to know that kind of thing
happen but here
is the truth every single one of us
needs to know that this kind of thing
happens
and it was then when i realized the
importance of that kind of discussion
group that kind of support network that
many people
might not have the strength
of peers of friends of a support
community and so
rumafei was born
and as we’ve worked it sounds like
everything is just
fine you know after that i found myself
working in this sector where a lot of
people try to find their self-worth you
know because
we’re helping people and you think that
if we help others
then maybe we’ll feel better about
ourselves that’s a lot of the sentiment
that comes but the truth is when you
start working in a place like that
you face this thing and it’s called
compassion fatigue i don’t know if
you’ve ever
heard of it but it’s when caregivers you
know we’re walking
in a line and each step we’re dangling
and on one side is
empathy but on this side
is apathy because we’re so so tired
of hearing the same stories without any
change in statistics without any change
in the cases in fact
sometimes they get even worse and we
feel powerless to do anything so we shut
ourselves
down from feeling bad for people
i know it sounds like something that’s
obvious but we face some of the worst
issues that you could ever imagine
children who are malnourished
who have stds
who have been held in cages pregnant at
ages
13 and 14.
you have to know your impact
after six years of working at rumafei i
can’t tell you how many times that i’ve
wanted to quit that i said
look i cannot deal with this any
more i’m so tired of not being able to
save more people for every one girl we
save thousands
more are being trafficked
but you stop and you think
because you see when i tell that story
you might think that
this one case was the one that keeps
driving ruma’s face six years later no
it is her now she is not a victim but a
survivor it’s the power of survivors
that keep us going that drive
us to make a bigger impact to make a
more important
impact
i know i’m standing here right now and i
might seem a little bit crazy and i
might seem
you know she’s just 17 what does she
know and i’ll accept that i
don’t you know i haven’t learned many
things in life
people see me and the thing that they
see is maybe activists
in terms of relationships they see
daughter they see sister
they see friend best friend
cousin granddaughter there are all these
labels that make up my identity
one of them is grandmother
and i like to add that myself sounds
kind of crazy i know
i will assure you i don’t have any
biological children or grandchildren
yet but i have three
grandbabies
one is one one is six months and the
other is five months
when people ask me why i start now the
answer is
actually very simple it’s because i am
not waiting
are human traffickers waiting for me
to graduate high school to graduate
university
no so i’m not waiting either
i’m not a voice for the voiceless i’m
merely someone who tries to amplify the
voice i try to give
a platform because these girls they have
voices and they’re shouting
so loud you just don’t want to hear them
because they make you
uncomfortable and so when people ask why
i tell them
pretty easy because i don’t want my
three grandkids to grow up in a world
where they have to worry
about what happened to their mothers
happening to
them
because it happens all the
time
i don’t know much but i know i’m a
grandmother
and i know and it’s taken me a while to
know this
that my impact is
real and so can yours
look we’re growing up or at least living
in a world where we have become digital
natives we grow up and
we already know how to use phones ipads
laptops and there are websites like
itabisa.com and
oregonchange.org that aim to facilitate
our need to change the world
there are more and more youth driven
organizations and movements that are
mobilizing
each other and our power so that we can
make
something better you don’t have to just
have the same passion
but what you need to have is commitment
it’s consistency
and at the risk of being incredibly
cliched it’s
love and so i hope
you know that if you get anything from
this speech
it’s to know that not only do you have
an impact
but you can make an even bigger one
thank you
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