When you are in solitude with no books nor gadgets around, inevitably your mind starts to wander as wildly as how Governor Ahok often reacts to his staunch opponents: it is just unstoppable.

You then begin to create your own dream; some may start shaping it into a form of pre-actions of a newborn idea, other ones got caught in the labyrinth of wanders... until the power of majority strikes in. Boss snaps, friends poke you in surprise, teachers laugh you off, electric poles await your head to hit them while walking; as if all were to unite in a compelling voice to wake you up, “Stop daydreaming!” Then you abide.

When people are entering the world of wanders, it suggests that their minds walk into an imaginative phase, combining every experience and knowledge they have ever obtained in order to expand new possibilities, however impossible and insensible they may sound. So much so that some people feel that they had better bury the dreams down to the lowest limbo than reveal them out to their fellows.

Why does it happen? I suppose it is because we, people of our age, tend to be raised in an environment where dreaming of something unprecedented, or even taking an amount of time to muse, is deemed a nonsense act. Instead, we were pushed within our lives to act on something right in front of us and make good money out of it. Spending some time to dream of something crazy is considered lazy and of no use.

On one of the three days of 2015 Sangihe Kids Festival held a week ago, hundreds of kids in Sangihe were brought up to a sequence of discovering dreams. Firstly in the morning, they were riding on a bus to few offices in Tahuna city to later experience a possibly alien surroundings: Well-dressed females spoke confidently of how radio station works; M-16s and MP5s were exhibited in a military base where the boys and girls were able to hold the guns onto their shoulders and acted like true infantry personnels; or witnessing how doctors were about to operate a patient of severe complicated cases. Secondly, they were gathering to share their recent observation within a small group. Then, the MC began to build the ambience of how dreams are made and how it can be achieved. Finally, the kids formed in a huge circle, each holding a post-it note and a pen, to write their dream professions; then stick it to a helium-filled balloons, dramatically set them free to the sky as to fulfill the old proverb, “Bercita-citalah setinggi langit.”

I wish you could read the notes: teacher, engineer, architect, policewoman, doctor, soldier, priest. Moreover, I wish you could feel the energy in the room: sensing the wild imagination following what’s written in the notes that were formed in the juveniles’ free-exploring minds: to be this kind of soldier, that kind of priest, a whole different kind of architect, and so forth. Those positive waves that lingered in their heads, I believe, are the things that would keep the dream alive. Dream professions might change some other day, yet the motivation to grow and reach something in the future stays on.

Were you to stand alongside the kids within the dream-discovering session, how would you dare to carry the dream away from them? To dismiss that one thing that can only prevent them from giving up schools when they get bullied, choked by the teachers, raped by an asshole, ordered to beg in the streets instead of carrying books and pens to school? If you, by any chance, put on my shoes back in the day of the festival, I bet you wouldn’t even help yourself writing your own dream instead.

As I paraphrase the words of my recent friend Walter, a Queensland-graduate and Jakarta Globe contributor: when you are in the downside of life, slammed down to the grave by anything, the dream you have will keep you go through. 

Last night, I got on board with Eden and Christian, two of the aforementioned Sangihe Kids Festival participants, in a ship; the 11-year old boys from Matutuang Island who dared to write their names AND wishes to be a football player and architect in my laptop without hesitation. It is something I would never think of to convey to my teachers when I was their age; since it would just be ignored as a slur of little importance. Yet now they are living in the world full of dreams, encouraged by a good teacher that those should be held high in the sky full of stars and grapped tight while being in the ground of agony, failure, and hatred.

When we are able to initiate a society that can support our kids to dream big and strive for it, I suppose that mocking people with dreams will be of no point anymore, won’t it?

And, anyway, when Jesus decided to let himself crucified altogether with the crooks, wasn’t it also a part of his dream to redeem the sins of mankind so we could start our lives all over again according to the commandments of God?

Today’s Good Friday.

Tahuna, April 3, 2015