Written by Annette Koops Monday morning at five o’clock someone was whispering in my ear: ‘wake up Annette, we leave in 5 minutes’. I looked around and realized that I was lying on the floor in a Buddhist monastery with my classmates around me (only the girls of course). For someone who was lying on a small mattress on the floor with ten other (snoring) people around me I slept very well. Was that because of the relaxing atmosphere in the monastery, because of the meditation we did together with the Buddhist monk called Bhikku Jothidammo, or was it because of the traditional Ugandans stories Tabitha told me the night before, most of them very moralistic and bad ending. Probably it was a combination of all. Five minutes later I sat in the minibus that drove us to the Borobudur. Before we could leave the car it was surrounded by people who tried to sell something to us. We woke up early with the idea to see the sunrise, but it was very cloudy. But even on a cloudy morning the Borobudu...

Written by Janneke van den BrandWeekend again. The weeks are flying by like they are seconds... Only two weeks left on the summer school in Yogyakarta.Two weeks is a short period of time, but I can speek for all of us, when I say, we've all been enriched. Though we might not always understnad eachother, and we might not always agree with one another, the whole experience of the past few weeks has brought us all new perspectives and new confrontations with the limits of our own framework. Or at least it has made me question my own frameworks.Saturday was the day to take a little off-time. So what do girls do when the have some off-time?Shopping!Shopping in Indonesia is a totally different experience then shopping in the Netherlands... To start with the heigth of the people... I'm 1,82m tall, which is tall for a girl, even to Dutch standards. For comparison: the avarage height of the Indonesians is 162.4 cm for men and 151.3 cm for women.This means that I'm constantly sticking out of...

Written by Ivana Prazic Problematizing the Bioethics paradigm as a tool of social transformation is what has been bothering me for a while now, at the level of its underlying assumptions, which I understand to be: 1. Societal ties have reached the level of not only overwhelming dehumanization of the "other," but also of ontologically and politically absolute alienation from the nature; 2. Social, and wider environmental space, is valued foremost as part of one's property; 3. Independent, rather than inter-dependent, individual is the undisturbed and unquestioned ontological and political unit; 4. Rather than a community of socially and ecologically well-integrated beings, current society is structured as a totality of mutually alienated individuals, inhabiting earth experienced only as (potentially) tamable habitat. 5. This alienation is reproduced through emotional patterns of self-alienation, both producing and being grounded in highly emotionally self-detached individu...

Written by Pusvyta SariWho are you? Who am I?Why am I here? Why are you there?Work, break, breath, eat, Chat, drink, sleep, and dream In the world that we call ‘earth’.Shall we dance…shall we sing..Such happiness being humanWe create great things togetherWith respect each otherWish harmony forever…Hehe..I just tried to write a ‘poem’, lyric or whatever you want to call it…It is because of this inspiring summer school, especially at day 9, when we talk about Sustainable Development: Rethinking the Relationship between Ecology, Ethics and (religious) Pluralism and Identity and pluralism. .^_^.Ok then, I want to remind you all of some days that we went through together with Indian, Dutch, Ugandan and Indonesian participants of this summer school. It is such an amazing time. I shared a moment of this amazing time with my friends at LKiS, we were very happy to welcome everyone in our ‘pendopo’ this afternoon.After the discussion we had, I realised that India and Indonesia have similar pr...

 Written by Sherria Ayuandini It’s the third consecutive day without classes. A perfect time to take the day easy and stay in bed recuperating! Well… not quite. We have 7 must read articles for Tuesday and group meetings to attend to. But all in good fun of course. And thanks to a bit of diligence, groups start to have a better idea where to head for in their collective task. The Identity group even courageously embarks on a self-imposed homework: focusing on youth and identity, the members are set to brainstorm about methods of teaching and identity stereotypes exist in school; as well as how the two links to one another. And check out the progress of the Sustainable Development group! Their dialogue results surround us, literally—as they stick their huge flipchart discussion papers shamelessly on the study room wall. So… to recap, Identity group = courageous, Sustainable Development group = shameless. Guess what group I belong to :D But all in all, everybody has been a v...