My Malaysia experience is tremendous!
The United Religion Initiatives (URI) through the Youth Leadership Program opened my opportunity to meet new friends from other countries, establish networks with other faiths and understand better what is interfaith.
Being one of the URI Youth Ambassador for 2011, is another wonderful chapter of my life and touch other's lives through interfaiths. It was a best ever experience I had in my entire life and it means so much to me! It is an additional package to the totality of me. The context of interfaith is an additional ingredients in volunteerism. To share doesnt always means to give, but sometimes, understanding one's faith is a useful tool to touch one's heart.
Mingling with other people that made significant contributions in promoting peace and harmony, genuine respect with religions and diversity and love to music inspires me to move forward and continue to share and volunteer.
Ratna, Puji, Nivy, Jamel, Vincent, Amier and others are though young yet dedicated. I really admire how they showcase their cultures and traditions and I believe that they are good role models with great potentials in changing the world and touch other's lives.
It was during this wonderful event where I finally met Matthew Youde, Youth Coordinator from Wales, Sharon Vaswani and Jessica Woodward whom I only talked with at "skype" and Facebook"! Being with them is an awesome experience, though I always got "nosebleed" when they speak a little faster!
From the Philippines, I met Orland who has been a brother to all of us and he inspires me to discover more about "spiritual connections" with God. Shane Merioles helped me unviel my inner most talent on spiritual singing which I only discovered during our music concert! The poignant words of Rem Tanuan while reading our prayer poem seems like a relaxing sound to my soul. The gracefulness of Ishilta while doing the spiritual dancing is irristable! The group singing of "We are all connected" is like a chain of electric current that passes from us to the audiences.
The Youth Leadership Training, for me, is a form of bonding. We share knowledge, insights and experiences with different young leaders from the SEAPAC Region. This training provide significant contribution on how we are going to improve our ways in the context of volunteerism.
The YLP Training and my visit to Malaysia is very frutiful and meaningful. I thank everyone I met for sharing and for becoming part of my life's new chapter.
Vivian Baraguir
URI Global Youth
