The day begin with a welcoming dance to welcome us in Honolulu. I have included a short video of the welcoming dance. Thanks to Qistina for the video clip. Enjoy it!
The next activity is the speed dating where we have to get to know each other in about a minute for each individual. It is quite interesting and challenging to develop the questions and create the interest in your partner. At the end of the speed dating, we have a discussions on the techniques of meeting people, and the learning process as well as to observe the bigger pictures of what is actually happening. They are several techniques of developing questions that have been identified from the discussion which are developing a preset questions or developing a chain questions. A preset questions is the questions that you have thought about before the conversation is happening while the chain questions is to develop the questions when you started talking with the person from a topic discussed by the person. So, both people must be genuinely interested in what is being talked about and create an in depth conversation.
Learning about other people and what do they know is essential. Nobody can knows everything and there are always something new to learn from other people. There is this concept called the "blips" which means pieces of information from various sources. The blips usually happens in a conversation where we can hear about new things that we did not know before. So, we have to capture as much as possible the new information from the conversation. Learning is a tiring process especially when we are in a different environment and culture. It takes time for people to adapt and it is actually a process which means it does not happen instantly. Finally, the other key element in the learning process is listening. We have to listen in order to receive the information.
In opening ourselves to the bigger pictures, we have been made to understand the concept of "weak ties". The weak ties is connecting with people who you are not familiar with and do not have a strong ties. They may come from a different background or disciplines. It enables us to get new ideas and different ways of viewing things or perspectives which may be different from our's. So, the key element here is diversity where all of this may happen. We may get the same view and same way of thinking with the people we are comfortable with or in the same discipline, thus minimising the chances for us to learn more. There is also another concept called the "Third Culture" which means the new culture that be created. For example, forming a new NGO which have people coming from different backgrounds and disciplines. They will then create their own culture in the organisation. The third culture can also be defined as people who are trained in one discipline and move to another disicpline.
After the lunch break, we have a talk by Ramsay Taum,Co-Founder of Sustain Hawai‘i & Cultural Advisor to UH Travel Industry Management School. He is a co-facilitator of Sustain Hawai‘i, an action-based, educational non-profit organization dedicated to improving quality of life by balancing present and future social-cultural, ecological, and economic needs. Taum is also a practitioner and instructor of several Native Hawaiian practices, including ho‘oponopono (stress management and conflict resolution), lomi haha (body alignment) and lua (Hawaiian combat/battle art). He is the Director of Community Outreach and lecturer at the UH School of Travel Industry Management. As the founder and managing director of the LEI (Life Enhancement Institute) of the Pacific, LLC, Taum also provides consultancy services aimed at integrating Native Hawaiian host cultural values and principles into contemporary business.
Mr. Ramsay presented to us about the concept of Hawaii from the traditional perceptives of the aborigines. He relates all the elements in Hawaii including the name of Hawaii with the nature as what their ancestors think. He urges the importance to look back at this concept to ensure a sustainable Hawaii and disagrees with what the newcomers (the west) is doing in Hawaii (the unbalanced between development of tourism activities (capitalist), and the actual resources capacity of the island). He compares Hawaii with a life raft which have to survive on it's own due to its geographical location in the middle of nowhere and ask whether we would like to invite more people into the life raft with a limited resources. At the end of his presentation he effectively convince us of the earth as the life raft in the sea of space as Hawaii in the middle of the Pacific ocean.
We went to Waikiki and the beach in the evening. I've some pictures below.
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