#MyFreedom Day at BIS

Dear BIS community, below, please find a message from the G9s:

The grade 9 Individuals and Societies with Mr Wood, have recently focussed on the connection between the British empire and slavery. We then looked at modern day slavery in depth and made this our MYP Service as Action project in which we performed a drama production with the inclusion of protest art and songs in term 2. We continued to spread awareness of modern day slavery at the GIN conference 2017 in South Korea, and finally were contacted by CNN to raise more awareness on March 14th, #MyFREEDOMday. #MyFREEDOMday is a day-long student-driven event to raise awareness about human trafficking and slavery within schools and communities around the world. We decided to take part in this event and project our voices and opinions about modern-day slavery.

Our aim was to educate our local community about slavery’s presence in the world we live in today and by highlighting this, we hope to continue efforts to eradicate slavery. To achieve our aim, we organized and carried out various activities throughout the week and the actual day. We invited the secondary students, teachers, parents, and our local community, Taman Bacaan, to support the event. We conducted a postcard making activity for secondary homerooms and these postcards were then used on the invitation letter to parents and also our big group picture that will later be sent to CNN. We also put up a canvas in front of the library and proposed the big question, “What does freedom mean to you?” This was opened up to secondary students, teachers, and parents to be signed. BIS Live happened at lunch with many participants sharing protest songs related to freedom in various languages. During period 7 we gathered everyone on the small field and divided them into their nationalities. Like the 30th anniversary, we marched towards the big field and had everyone say freedom in their native language as they passed the camera that video taped our whole march. Then everyone was directed to the tennis court to play a true or false game called ‘last one standing’ where the last person to get all the answers to questions right wins the game. This enabled us to interact with the community while raising informative and statistical awareness about slavery in an interesting way. Lastly, we took a group photo of us holding signs #MyFREEDOMday and different postcards made previously. All of these events were recorded and have been compiled into a clip by Yuki Omamiuda that will be shared with our community in the next e-news.

Our hope was to spread awareness to our community, to achieve this we included multilingualism and multiculturalism throughout the event as we are an international school with families from all over the world. We posted all photos and videos on our social media website to advocate for the abolition of modern day slavery. We believe that we have successfully achieved our aim as more people in our community are now aware of the issue and also the videos were broadcast on live CNN news even though they wrote that we were from Jakarta! We hope that this is not a short term service as action and would like to continue with this project and one way in which you can help us with this is to please follow our social media sites by clicking on the links below. We will be updating these social media accounts periodically so that this issue does not fade away.

Thank you for your support!

Twitter: https://twitter.com/sasbis2020

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sasbis2020/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SASbis2020/

By: Jae Yeon Lee & Harley Starr