Last intern in to make a blog post.It’s been a busy couple of days for Relief 2.0 in Tokyo getting ready for the exhibition at Fab Café, creating publicity materials (wonderfully created by Roxanne) and press kits, getting the layout all sorted out, coming up with reports and videos to document the work, bla-bla-bla-bla. But right now, in the cosiness of the Tokyo Share College (God bless this residence and its amazing inhabitants), with friends working beside me, the television tuned to an agitated commentator barking women’s football updates, my thoughts turn to the power of words.

I'm not going to make it sound fine and dandy because truth is, it's not. I've never one a more difficult internship than this, yet nothing is more exciting and empowering.

You're left to completely run the show, make important decisions, and also get on your knees to scrub the floor. It wasn't pretty yet I realised that's how the world is.

It is the final day of Social Business Forum Asia 2012 and the social businesses are presenting for the audience. 

Singapore's 17 year old social entrepreneur Kim Min Seok also presented his social business Novoglobal.

2 Interns from Relief 2.0 mission -- Fukuoka also volunteered at the flooded areas in Kyushu 

You can read about XinMin's experience at: 

The second day was every bit as memorable as the first day, because it was the day that my friend and I headed down with Eden and his friends to do relief work at the flooded areas in Kyushuu. We had to take the train down early in the morning, and had to wake up at 5am. This was the equivalent of 4am in Singapore, and it was a milestone since I have not woken up so early before.

When I was on the flight heading towards Shanghai, the destination of my stopover before hopping onto another flight to Fukuoka, it all felt so surreal. Having only ended another hectic internship the day before, I did not have any time at all to rest, other than the flight times. I thus did not have enough mental preparation for this upcoming internship, and it all felt like a dream.

One of the fascinating things about this internship is how the following 12 hours would always be unexpected. At times, this could mean a lack of planning, but in this instance, the flexible nature of the internship allowed us to go ahead and create our own plans.

Wednesday, 25 July 2012

The internship so far has been pretty memorable. We started out with plans for two art exhibitions in Fukuoka and Tokyo, but somehow found ourselves racing for supplies in the middle of the night on 19th July after we made a spontaneous decision to head up to Yabake in Oita prefecture to help with the flood relief efforts.