24 APRIL 2024

Experiencing Human Connections

I have this picture that floats into my mind whenever I think back on my experience as an intern. For one of our projects, Gempak 100: Sungai Pinang Kita, we were going back and forth at a local primary school over the course of 4 weeks. The long work weeks, an unfamiliar topic and environment, coupled with facilitating students and coordinating collaborators, left me drained every day. One Sunday, I stayed back with a student who was waiting for her parents to pick her up. I tried making small talk and she told me her father was coming from work to pick her up. We then sat in silence for the next 10 minutes until she got up saying her father was here, but all I saw was a huge bus parked in front of the school gate. In disbelief, I followed her out and saw a man beaming brightly and asking her to get on the bus. As she waved bye to me, my eyes started to water- it was an emotional sight for me. After long days at work, it was like a glimpse behind the scenes of the people I was working with, and how each of them was their own person, with their own story. And so, one of the most significant things that I gained through this internship is experiencing relationships and connection between people.

In anthropology, we have these people we call “armchair anthropologists”, in which they just sit at their desks, study the materials that other people have found out for them and put it all together. In contrast to the “armchair anthropologists”, there were those I would consider the truly influential ones. They went to talk and live with the communities, be a part of their lives, learn from them and took all of that in. I felt a bit like them when I was on my tasks as the programmer for the Sustainability of Traditional Trades George Town programme. I carried around this tote bag with all the items I needed to feel secure enough to walk into town to meet different traders each day. I guess I could even call myself a “tote bag anthropologist”.

In order to make a programme about and for the community, I knew I had to do my best to understand the community. What they experienced and thought about traditional trades was my top priority as I wanted to see how I could use this information in creating a lesson plan that was comprehensive and realistic for the participants. Understanding, however, starts from building a relationship. So I spent my mornings and afternoons, sitting at these traders' shops, talking to them about their business, their customers, even their families, advice for life and their most memorable experiences. Soon, they were showing me pictures of their children and giving me hugs every time they saw me. When I had worked through the lesson plan and the students came to participate, the traders gave their all in interacting with them and I made sure to follow up on how they felt it had been or what we could do better. I had done ethnography in university, but this felt like I was building something with the community rather than just about them. I truly experienced how when I was dedicated to engaging people, that I could see not only results for myself and our beneficiaries but also feel the genuine connection that I had developed with the traders and witnessed that among the students as well.   

Challenging Comfort Zones

I had two very apparent weaknesses that I did not really think would affect my internship as much as it did. Firstly, language. I consider myself quite a good communicator and pick up language relatively fast. Compared to when I was in school, I thought my Bahasa Melayu had improved significantly, until I was faced with having to facilitate entire programmes in it. Normal conversations were alright, but standing up in front of everyone, giving instructions and well-thought out responses to a native speaker, in a non-academic setting, proved to be a lot different from what I had practiced with in university. This actually ended up being quite a big hit to my confidence at times. Facilitating children in itself was already difficult, but with this factored in, I felt even more self-conscious that I wasn’t doing well enough. So I tried escaping when those moments arose, but I quickly realized that it was essentially impossible- there were only so little of us, and there was so much to do! I recall an incident when I was helping the students with an art project. While giving instructions, I forgot the correct way to say “most right”, so I went on saying “rightest” for the first hour of the programme. At that moment, I definitely felt a bit defeated, but there was also nothing I could do about it, more urgent matters were at hand. But when I looked back on it, I realized the children had no problem understanding me, and maybe their little laughs about it actually managed to lighten the tense atmosphere.

My second unassuming but very apparent weakness was my poor sense of direction. Despite having grown up in Penang, and walked around George Town to meet the traders or just to have meals, I still struggled to know how to get to places if I didn’t have Google Maps on. I had walked through Little India countless times for the last 5 months, and still I always stood at the junction for a good minute before turning down one of the roads, only to realize it was wrong, still. Thankfully, George Town is forgiving and the people I work with were even more so patient. So when there was no choice but for me to lead a group of students on a mini tour, my colleague walked the entire route with me the evening before, and when I did eventually still make one wrong turn, the students just went along without complaints.

So, after these 5 months, I do think I’ve gotten better in both these things. But the bigger lesson was how I did all these things despite the insecurities and reservations that I had about my abilities. I was always someone who wanted to be in control, to know everything I was getting myself into before I did them, perhaps it was a desire I had to not mess up and be perceived as incompetent. But I realized early on in my internship that not only was that unrealistic, it was very limiting. There were so many times when I had tried to understand everything that was going on when being plugged into a project, but I could just never keep up in time to be swept up into the motion of it. So, I resorted to just taking it on and going with it even when I did not understand. I told myself that I would learn along the way instead, and that soon, I would understand. Perhaps I was finally experiencing on-the-job training at its finest. I tagged along, I observed, I took notes, then I took on roles, gave some ideas, led some tasks and things moved along. In two months, my manager had felt like I’d been here for over a year. Maybe it’s cliche to say that I had stepped out of my comfort zone and challenged myself a lot, but indeed I found myself doing a bunch of things I wouldn’t naturally want to do. I did them scared, I did them embarrassed, I did them unconfidently, but I still did them, and somehow they turned out alright.

Recognizing The Possibilities

The first time I visited the office was for my interview. I call it an interview, but it was almost nothing like an interview if I was being honest. When I sat down with my manager, it became a conversation that lasted for two hours. Since the start, it was not just about having me understand Arts-ED, but there was this explicitly expressed interest by Arts-ED to understand me as a person who would be working with them. That set up the precedent for how most of the interactions I had with my colleagues and the organization went over the last 5 months. I came into this internship with a very surface level understanding of Arts-ED’s works, and perhaps an even blurrer understanding of what I wanted from this internship. But throughout the process, I was constantly opening up my mind to new possibilities, redefining what I had previously thought about this field, all the while reaffirming the desire I had for human connection. 

My entire undergraduate degree I had been drowned in concepts and theories about humans and society. Even my exposure to them in reality was very academic. When I experienced glimpses of genuine connection, I knew how that delighted my heart, and I always tried to include a bit of that into the assignments I worked on. But all of this is complex and so were my thoughts about humanity and our society. Through the internship, however, I came to terms with something I could not deny, that I loved so much the connection between people- to be a part of it, to witness it. Maybe it wasn’t academic, but it was something I could truly get behind. I found Arts-ED’s works to be challenging in a realistic and academic way, but also enriching and comforting for me as well in a “shared humanity” sense. 

Impactful things leave a mark on you, be it visible or not. But meaningful things, I believe, open up your thoughts and inspire changes in your mindsets and perceptions. For most of my studies, people asked me what I would do in the future after I graduated. The standard answer was: “Well, technically I could do anything, as long as I can show my future employer that they need someone who understands people and society.” But now, I tell people about my experience at Arts-ED and how I see myself venturing into such fields, which I had not even known existed in this capacity previously. So now, not only do I have a more nuanced perspective about society, communities and everything in between; I also have a wider perception about my future, especially in terms of my interests, abilities and goals. All the conversations that we shared, each interaction with community members, pieces of information that I had gathered and all the things I had observed in the name of carrying out a programme throughout this internship, has in many ways, helped me explore and understand myself better. 

There’s this concept of a microcosm, that the world is represented and reflected in our little human bodies and lives. While it is a somewhat spiritual concept, I think it can be applied in a way that speaks volumes about my experience. Throughout my internship, I put myself out there to do things for and with the community, to take an interest in the society and understand the bigger picture. Yet in turn, I found that these acts of outreach had also translated into my personal life as me learning more about myself and my possible future trajectory, all the while appreciating each present moment I found myself to be in. 

An internship with Arts-ED was an experience that I might describe as all and more. You know how many internships end up being just printing documents? Well, at Arts-ED, it was often doing that while being in a team meeting about citizenship education, and communicating with a community member on what he thought was an important point to share from his experience on sustainability, and making a booking for a hall to conduct next week’s student programme in. It was all-rounded. Being involved in different parts of something at different capacities, and working with different people, from different backgrounds. Things were constantly changing, and I learned to flow, adapt and change as well. It was a real world experience, but never lacking in support and encouragement.

So unlike me, you don’t have to go searching “cultural organizations georgetown” on Google. If this piques your interest, take it from me, you’re this close to an internship experience that is so much more than meets the eye! Drop us your application or inquiries at info@arts-ed.my or reach us on our social media https://linktr.ee/ArtsED 

My utmost appreciation is extended to the team at Arts-ED and all those we work with and work for.