My Second Day on the Leadership Conference "High Ropes"

On the August 2008, Cung and I have joined the Leadership Conference in Prigen, Pasuruan, for about nine days. We were in the same team and experienced so many interesting things there. On the second day, my team had outbound. First game was “giving the ball”. The rule was that everybody had to throw the ball while saying each other’s name. There were 16 people of us who played this game and did it for about 27 seconds. This game required us to consider some basic principles, as for example, focusing and concentrating on the goals, having a solid team working, and understanding each other’s capacity. of each member, self awareness, and having commitment to the agreement.

We used a rope a lot during the second game. It was quite interesting. For the two first rope activities, I didn’t have any difficulties, but in the “Tarzan’s” rope, I had some difficulties to make myself to jump over the rope like Tarzan. It took me about a few minutes before I had gained my confidence back to act like a jumping Tarzan. In fact, I could not do it well, and certainly that made me completely embarrassed. On the next ropes, I could do it almost perfectly, and I enjoyed riding “Flying Fox”. It was such an interesting game that I could not help shouting at everybody, expressing my deepest happiness for being able to pass all ropes. This game aimed at motivating and encouraging you to believe in yourself.

Third activity was “trees fall”. Oh my Gee, What a game it was that I hate and I promise not to do it again. Once, I did it in PWEC, now I did it here. I rejected Chung’s idea, and frankly speaking I almost started to cry at that time. I did not care when so many people looked at me and started to think that I was childish. Finally, I did it but badly. Actually, there were some values on this game. First, everybody have strength and weaknesses, if you felt like to fall, just let yourself fall, because if not, you will bother others. Be brave and just do it, analyze the problem inside yourself when you want to do something and do not feel scared.

The fourth activity was called “Tarantula”, a game that demanded all participants to carefully move a chair with water placed on it to certain spots by means of a rope. The objective of this game was basically to teach everybody to understand others’ ability and to do a careful analysis on the problem. The strategy was to take responsibility on your part. Fifth activity was “war game”. The rules of the game were like this, you had a president to command, soldiers as much as you have, and two people were to be the prisoners. 21 The soldiers had responsibility to save the prisoners by crossing the field that full of bomb with closing his eyes and bring back the prisoners. 22 The values were, first, analyze the goal and strategy, trust your friend to lead your way, focus on goal and instruction, delegate others, and the order must be clear and measurable.
Sixth activity was “crossing the bamboo on the surface of water”. Then the seventh activity was “spider web”. In this game, Uni Icha was the first person to enter the rope, while I was the last girl to enter in because I was the smallest girl. The strategies that we used were: think others and everyone’s ability, and trust your team.

Eight activities was “Pingpong game”. We delivered a tiny ball called “pingpong” with the half parts of bamboo. It needed patience to do it until our destiny. Ninth activity was “holed pipe”. We had to fill the pipe with water until the ball comes out. In this game, none of us could do that. It failed because the holes in the pipe were so many and it made the water always comes out. Tenth activity was sharing session about what our strength and weakness in other’s point of view. It was really works to know our character deeply and could be our reflection. After that we draw a plant that represent ourselves, wrote our strengths and weaknesses in paper and stick it on the part of our plant that represented us.

Those activities really made us close to each other and become one family, even if only that day. I was so happy to pass all the games with my best. I hope I will be able to see my friends in this conference someday and to do useful activities for our society.