E and C Week reflection

Reflection: "Experiencing another's culture may open doors that were previously closed...but the choice to walk through those door is entirely up to you."

I am a Buddhist. What do the other religions believe in? What restrictions do they have? What clothes do they have to wear? What they have to do everyday? I do not know any of the answers until ENC week ended. And i would never thought of exploring the other religions' culture if not for this programme. ENC week is a week is enriching as it is filled with outdoor learning journeys where we go out to different places to explore other races or religions' culture. Then, i realised that there is so many difference between our different cultures. Well, to be honest, i realised that walking down the streets of these different places, they displayed a rich culture of their race. 

To be honest, i felt that many of the students who just eat and drink at those places are wasting their time instead of admiring the beauty of the culture that were displayed. For me, to look at this learning journey deeper, this is an opportunity for us to understand and appreciate the cultures of the different religion. Then, we can be aware of our actions and words so that we do not offend the other religions. Moreover, this can become a bridge between us and other friends of different religion. Additionally, this would then show that we from River Valley, although most are Chinese, but we also have knowledge about the other religions in terms of their culture. These are many benefits that we gain through this ENC week. To further explain, i will state an example. We now know that muslims have to fast for a month before celebrating Hari Raya Puasa. If we lack knowledge, we would just eat in front of our muslims friends. Even though our muslims friends may not mind, but it shows the lack of knowledge of culture and is very disrespectful of us to "tempt" them. 

The most impactful lesson that i experience is the importance of the different cultures. This may sound to general but what i mean by that is that the different culture give the different group of us a unique identity. And it is the unique identity that bind our hearts together. Given the unique identity when we were born, we must be proud of our religion or race. Not only this give us the unique identity, it also gives us a chance to learn from the other cultures so that we all living in the world not only have one type of beliefs. Sometimes, we may hear or riots going on in Singapore due to the different races or religion not happy with one another, or someone post rude comment on social media that offend the others. So, having different cultures also gives us an opportunity to learn how to communicate with others with different religion and also learn how to interact or resolve conflict with them. 

I feel that this programme can be improved such that a guide is given. What i mean is not a person but a paper that is filled with description so that when we walk through the places, we can have a better idea of why this exist or when it is built or even if it contributes to the success of Singapore. This guide would be etremel useful for the students to relate the information to our daily lives or it also aids us in doing our reflection. I think that this programme to let us learn more about the different culture that are unique and what we didn't know. This programme also help us to clear up misunderstandings about the other religions. ENC week, including the learning journeys and our lesson on Wayang Kulit (malay puppets), This broaden our horizon as we gain awareness about these cultures that we did not know of before this programme. 

For this programme, i was actively participating and continuously searching for facts and interacting with the shopkeepers over there to find out the purpose or the history behind the different beliefs. At the end, on the last day of the week, we did a presentation to consolidate all our learnings and i find it amazing that throughout these days, we gain so much knowledge about the other cultures and this preentation actualy help us to get different insights from different groups and we learned from each others' presentation. This greatly help us to conclude our findings in our mind through the presentations not only from our class but 2J too. 

The above is my reflection for ENC week and i hope that the others who view my reflection would gaina deeper insight about the different cultures of other religions or race and help them realise the importance of the cultures.