Language in Our Lives (L.O.V.E) was a project held by SCOPE CIMSA Universitas Indonesia (UI). Like its name, the project focused on the use of language in our lives. Through this project, we highlight two aspects of the use of language.
We all know that Indonesia has a rich diverse culture, with each of its own uniqueness and beauty. In this era of globalization, many of these diverse cultures are assimilated into one national culture—Indonesian. In the context of the use of language in Indonesia, many people of descent of those many diverse cultures can only speak Indonesian.
Brought to our concern, this issue sparked an idea from us, and therefore we present to you the first part of L.O.V.E., the International Mother Language Day. On the 21st of February 2018, which was the International Mother Language Day, we held a social media campaign to promote the rich diversity of culture among our society. Our hope was that through this campaign, we could reach people who start to forget their own diverse culture of their descent in this era of globalization and remind them to appreciate and preserve the beauty of it. The campaign was held on Instagram, and people were invited to post a short video of them saying the phrase “Banyak bahasa, satu cita untuk Indonesia!” in their own mother language. This campaign was held as the pre-event for the part two of L.O.V.E., which would be elaborated next.
On the other side of the issue mentioned before, in this era of globalization, the vastness of the globe that disconnects one end of the globe to the other has been resolved, one of them is with the global language-English. We all also know that Indonesia is a developing country, that can be helped with a few inputs from other more developed country. In order to reach these countries and learn more than what Indonesia is limited to give, we need this global language in our life.
This issue, brought along with the fact we found out—that some community, including one near Universitas Indonesia, is not educated or even exposed to this language, concerned us, and generated the idea of the second part of L.O.V.E., English for Kids. English for Kids was held in said community, the primary school students of Sekolah Master Depok, on Saturday, February 24th, 2018. We taught simple English used in daily conversations to those children. Specifically, the topic we brought up was about what they want to be when they grow up. We aimed to inspire those children and make them realize that English is a prospect useful later on in their lives. We wish we could report that the outcome was marvelously successful, but it wasn’t. We seem to need more than one meeting to actually inspire those kids, and we decided to consider English for Kids to be established as a community development project. We are currently in process of designing this project as a community development project and hopefully it will be established in the end of 2018.
