By Muhammad Nadzirul Afif (YES Program 2020)
My experience in the Malaysia Day Webinar as a volunteer was truly insightful. I had never attended a webinar with this theme. Thus, I decided to be a volunteer in this webinar to learn more about it. As a researcher in this team, I got to understand more about the different cultures in Malaysia.
In conjunction with Malaysia Day, the main topic of this webinar was about cultural diversity. For a few weeks before the event, we had posted some information regarding cultural festivals, traditional crafts and trades to improve public awareness regarding this issue. Malaysia is an incredibly diverse country, with many different ethnicities, languages and religions. People from each ethnicity have generally retained their ancestors’ cultural customs.
Besides that, we had posted some stories of foreigners experiencing festivals in Malaysia and how they loved the culture. Even though Malaysians are made up of many different ethnic groups, we respect one another enough to maintain a peaceful and loving Malaysia.
On the actual webinar day, we could follow and enjoy the proceedings even though we had to focus on our task as a volunteer in order to make sure the webinar was running smoothly. Every single volunteer executed their own role well and we got very positive feedback from the participants which made me feel so proud of my team.
Furthermore, I learned how important communication is when there are a few people working in a team. Even though we came from different backgrounds, cultures and ideologies, we still successfully organised this great webinar with proper preparations and discussions before D-day. I was really amazed how much this experience had bonded us together in a short period of time.
Last but not least, this programme not only improved my knowledge of the many cultures in Malaysia but it also added to my appreciation of the richness and diversity in our community instead of seeing it merely as unique to our nation.
