On Saturday morning, Nov. 20th 2010. Tangerang Youth Detention Center (The Center) with Books for Hope and Pustaka Lebah held Writing Workshop named “Fun Saturday“. This event took place at The Center’s Hall. There were 20 kids with age range from 13 to 18 years old participated in this event. Journalists from Gatra, MNC and Bintang Indonesia were also present. In addition to workshop, Books for Hope also donated books to the Center’s library.

Mr. Priyadi – as The Center’s Chief – delivered speech to start the event. He mentioned in his speech that he was very supportive with the workshop since it was aligned with his program – to provide applied skills to the kids. He added that recently there were various applied skills have been taught in the Center besides formal education. Some of these applied skills are: Computer course, mechanic skills, fishery, music, graphic design, drama etc. All these skills were provided in order to equip the kids once they were released. The Chief concluded his speech by sharing his aspiration that with so many applied skills taught in The Center, he hoped that in the near future The Center could become “living laboratory” for those who want to learn how to teach such skills to improve human life.

After The Chief’s speech, we continued to the movie session. We have selected “Kungfu Panda” as the movie. Olga Lydia – one of Indonesia’s Top Celebrities – led this session. She mentioned that there are so many values that we could learn from “Kungfu panda” one of them is the importance of having self confidence and strong willingness to keep learning in order to optimize someone’s talent.

During the movie, we saw some of these kids laughed happily as they watched the adorable main character – Po the Panda. The combination of simple story line, comedy elements and the value of life managed to captivate all these kids’ attention to the movie screen even though at the same time we tried to distract them by distributing delicious Krispy Kreme’s doughnuts. To these kids, watching television was a luxury activity in their daily life so we understood that they were really enthusiasts with this movie session.

Finished with the movie session, we continued with the workshop session. Koko from Pustaka Lebah opened this session by describing the workshop’s rules. He explained that after watching movie, every kids will be given a homework to write a story which theme aligned with movie’s theme. The story could be anything from movie’s review until personal experience as long as the theme aligned with the movie. These writings served as tickets for these kids which means those who don’t submit their writings in the next meeting – which will be held 2 weeks from this meeting – will not be eligible to participate in the movie session. Koko also mentioned that for those whose stories have been elected as the stories of the week will be rewarded. In order to facilitate these kids writing their stories, Books for Hope and Koko equipped these kids with workbooks and pencils. Koko ended the workshop session with encouragement to these kids that their writings could determine their future, as these writings will be published to the internet so the whole world could read it. “Physically you are confined in this place, however your writings are free to channel your opinion to the outside world” said Koko to conclude his session as well as to end the workshop.