Week Eight: Harry Potter’s Birthday, Swiss Galavanting, and the German Mission to Rwanda
I’ve been working on creating an official “Advisement of Rights” document for women in Indonesia. It’s essentially a short document that states the due process rights guaranteed by law in Indonesia. Since people technically have due process rights, the challenge for IBJ is making sure they are implemented on the ground. Part of that, and a significant of IBJ’s mission, is rights awareness campaigns. The more people who know and understand their rights, the more likely they are to be vocal about them when they get into situations where they are being violated. Although it may be a slow process, the goal is a cultural shift toward respect for these rights. The Advisement of Rights document IBJ created for China, for example, now hangs in many police stations throughout the country. That’s the end goal for Indonesia, so I’ve been searching through the Indonesian Constitution and Penal Code some more this week to find where the due process rights are outlined.
I’m also adding a section on what the government of Indonesia has committed to by signing the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women.
I also got pulled onto another emergency memo for the Rwanda trip. Karen and IBJ leaders were meeting with the German and French embassies in Rwanda to discuss the IBJ mission and see how the embassies’ goals in Rwanda align with IBJs for potential collaboration opportunities. Kristen and I wrote a quick internal memo about the background of each ambassador and the key goals each mission has set for Rwanda.
Outside of work this week:
- 4 more interns left this week! We will miss the presence of Emmanuel, Kejsi, Agnes, and Elijah over my last two weeks.
- July 31st is Harry Potter’s birthday, and every year I bake a cake and decorate it to resemble the birthday cake from the first Harry Potter movie. This year’s cake was a feat because Kristen and I baked it using only a ziploc bag, a spoon, a fork, a pot, and a single Tupperware. I brought it to the office to share with the team.
- We went to the lake nearly every day this week to avoid our boiling hot rooms in the Foyer, which don’t start to cool down until around 9 pm. If there’s one thing I’ve learned this summer, it’s that I am a weak American when it comes to lack of AC in summer.
- Kristen and I went galavanting around essentially the entire country on Saturday! Our goal was to see more of the beautiful towns in and around the Alps, which was a success. We explored Lucerne, Interlaken, and Bern. The train rides between each of these towns were the definition of scenic, and we kept looking at each other, looking back out the train windows, and saying “this is insane???”
- We went to Montreux (the little town on the opposite end of Lake Geneva from the city) and watched the sunset over the lake and behind a thousand-year-old castle.
