Today, my unit went for a hike but I had to stay back at our camp 🙁

No worries though! I had another amazing activity that I enjoyed the heck out of. I attended a series of ted talks on the topic of gender equity that took place right here at the jamboree site! And no, I didn’t spell that wrongly. It is actually equity, not equality. Never heard of that? Well actually, me neither before the first session. So, let me explain what I learned.

Equality means giving everyone the exact same rights, opportunities and status. It means being equal, especially in those things I listed above, whereas equity means giving everyone what they need to be able to succeed. Here is a picture that I took during the first ted talk to help you understand the term better.

To be honest, I was a bit upset to have missed the hike with my unit. I wasn’t sure if I made the right decision to not go with them but now, I don’t regret a thing. The speakers were amazing and incredibly capable of touching one’s heart. There was a speaker from Canada who explained to us what being a feminist means and cleared up some of the prejudices and stereotypes that are not true. Others spoke about how it is with gender equity in their countries, such as Brazil, China (more precisely Hong Kong) or the Netherlands, and how we have to fight for it. There were also male speakers that explained to us how to be a male feminist, we got to learn how to teach the younger ones around the world how wrong sexism is and we were reminded that people can be discriminated in the more developed countries too and that it’s not only about women –  that men can be discriminated too. We also talked about the LGBTQ+ community, which I believe is a very actual topic especially amongst people our age so it was all really nice to hear about.

All of the speakers were so passionate about the topic and it was obvious they knew what they were talking about. Some of them were heavily discriminated in their lifetimes and had to go through so much and yet, when they spoke about what must be a very sensitive topic to them, they didn’t seem angry at all. They just wanted to pass their messages on and help make the world a better place. That just reminded me so much of that one saying – not all heroes wear capes. There are millions of scouts all over the world. And there are billions of people. We can make that change and it truly is up to us to get ourselves out there and speak up. To not keep quiet. We are shaping the world not only for ourselves, but also for our children and our children’s children. It is our responsibility to make this world a better place for them and we cannot achieve that by fighting, by violence, keeping silent and not being ourselves. We need to step up the game and start fighting. It doesn’t matter whether you’re male, female or anything else. You just have to be a good person.

We had several discussions with the other spectators and shared our ideas and opinions. We got to know so much about hardships and difficulties people in other countries have to face which helped us to, yet again, understand each other better. I think it’s very important to talk about issues like these. Many of us might get discriminated because of our gender without even realizing it because it’s so normalized. Hearing and talking about this definitely opens one’s eyes. Acknowledging the issue is the first step to solving it.

I am going to another one of these tomorrow – this time the topic’s gonna be multiculturalism! I can’t wait!

Also, I want to share this picture of sunset last evening. It was beautiful.