A Day for Youths: IYD 2013

By Chetana Tulachan for Yuwalaya

Hello Everyone!! We have been busy organising few events while also participating in trainings and programmes. Right at this moment, we can proudly say that we are enhancing ourselves, exploring our knowledge and making lots of plans for the days to come. Anyway, we wanted to write to you about one of our major events that took place in August. If you are going way back to August to think what happened then, it was International Youth Day on August 12. This year the IYD was celebrated globally with the theme "Youth Migration: Moving Development Forward".

On that event's note, our team members participated in rally, workshops, meetings and seminars that were organised by different governmental and nongovernmental organisations. But what we want to share with you is our main event "Youth Express" that we were quite lucky to perform at Yuwak Yuwati Mela, jointly organised by the Ministry of Youth and Sports, UN agencies and other NGOs of Nepal.

As a youth based organisation, we wanted to be bit more explorative and innovative and not just limited to the theme. We wanted more expression and more voices of youths for youths. So we chose to do our programme based on the PechaKucha Style. If you are not aware of PechaKucha, it is a concise art of presentation based on 20 presentations x 20 seconds format that had started from Japan. It means a presenter can talk about any topic for 20 seconds per slide. In total, s/he gets about 6.6 minutes for the presentation.  To many of our participants, co-organisers and even our presenters, this was a new concept. Therefore, this added more excitements as well as extra demands on our team to put up a great programme.

Our audiences were patiently waiting. We started with flute performance from Aayush. And the show rolled on. We had great musical performances from Sushmita Diyali, Prabin Bajrachayra,  Sandeep Dhimal and friends, Pratirodh Shrestha and friends, Sanket Shrestha from Word Warrior performing slam poetry. When our major PechaKucha started, we could feel everyone's attention on us. Our first presenter, Juju Kaji Maharjan, youth entrepreneur talked his momo and tea business and how he was helping street children with fund collected from his business. Our next presenter Kamal Kumar, poet and organiser of monthly poetry sharing forum CafeKavita talked about their quite famous forum in Kathmandu among poets and poetry listeners. We could see his love for poetry. Priti Sherchan, artist coordinator for Kolor Kathmandu, talked about challenges and emerging love and appreciation for street arts. We got to see some great street arts happening all around Kathmandu. With the third presentation rolling on, our express program was going full on.

Pramod Neupane was from Tweet for Cause Nepal. He shared his experiences of raising fund through twitter to help different causes. We feel that this inspired many listeners to think and use social media for cause.  Rachana Upadhyaya, our friend and a youth activist, talked about women in Nepal. Aakar Anil, another reputed personality in social media talked about the use of social media. Another great presentation to remind us that social media is not just for writing down "What's on your mind?" but being part of the global network. And our last presenter for the day Pema Diki Sherpa, a very impressive woman from 7 Summit's Women Group presented about their group, their achievement and challenges faced in mountaineering expedition. Who would not get inspired after listening to their successful climb to the highest peaks in Australia, Europe and Africa, including the world's highest mountain Mt Everest?

So at the end of the day, our team was really tired but very inspired by the youths who talked about their ideas, experiences and passion. We hope that our audiences too got inspired and took away lots of ideas on what youths can actually do. We can see that youths have stepped beyond the boundary to pursue their passion and left a great example to show that proves the saying from George Bernard Shaw that "The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them."

Tired but inspired Team Yuwalaya

We want to thank our singers, presenters and all our direct and indirect supporters who helped put up a great show for us. Huge, huge thanks to Mr Sujan Chitrakar for supporting and guiding the PechaKucha Event. We were really honoured to have you in the show. And thank you to our all participants who came to watch us. Last, but not the least, our gratitude to our major event partners Global Action Nepal, Sathi Sanga Man kaa Kura (Equal Access Nepal), Café Kavita and PechaKucha.org.