The year 2010 has been dedicated by Malaysia as the ‘Year of Innovation and Creativity’.

Does Sarawak have to worry about not having participants for this initiative?

The answer to that is No.

Thanks to Angkatan Zaman Mansang Sarawak (Azam), Sarawak already has at least five ideas to qualify for being innovative and creative.

Azam has entrusted these ideas on the very capable shoulders of a few youths aged between 17 and 25.

Actually, the youths themselves thought of the ideas.

Azam, through its subsidiary Faradale Media-M Sdn Bhd (FMM), designed the Sarawak Youth Empowered and Engaged to Serve programme or Sarawak YES! Programme last year, to allow our youths to find out for themselves how they could contribute towards helping their fellow Sarawakians.

A project under this programme — Youth Engaged in Social Innovation, Service, Education and Enterprise (YES I SEE) — asked them to come up with projects where their time and energy would be focused towards activities, which would ultimately be of benefit to the state.

Although the focus of the programme was to get Sarawak’s youths to become more engaged in social causes, Azam and FMM were more than pleasantly surprised to find the ideas generated both innovative and creative.

One of the projects being worked on at the moment is trying to tie in environmental conservation with housing.

The project leader, 25-year old engineering student Rata Muda Shalom Eing, explained that her group was trying to ‘recycle’ agriculture waste into building material.

“Apart from reducing the amount of items that would end up just being wasted, like corn stalks or similar natural fibres, we believe that our project will also help underprivileged Sarawakians to generate income,” she said.

“We are also looking at being able to work together with other NGOs to support their own projects, for example, Habitat for Humanity, which builds affordable house with poor families,” she added.

Rata  believes that although her group may consist of young people — her group members are made up of mostly of 17-year-olds — their age is not an obstacle for them to turn their idea into reality.

“We don’t see it as an obstacle, but a challenge. If youths from other countries can do something like this, our youths need to know that they can to,” she said, while adding that support from family and friends on the project is also very valuable to herself and her group members.

Another group of youths in the YES I SEE project are concentrating their efforts on promoting Sarawak’s traditional delicacies.

“We are attempting to raise the awareness on the importance of preserving and maintaining our traditional cuisine and also the cultural arts of Sarawak,” said 17-year-old Julian Sim, who is the group leader.

His group came up with this idea while brainstorming on how they could contribute in putting Sarawak on the world map.

“We hope that from our efforts, our fellow Sarawakians will realise that preserving our culture is important. We want to maintain Sarawak’s richness of heritage,” he said, adding that they hoped their project would be able to attract more tourists to Sarawak, as well.

Seventeen-year-old Jof Raika Total’s group wants to create videos on successful Sarawakian youths.

“We want to showcase the success and achievements of the youths in Sarawak. I feel that not many of our youths know about the success stories of people their own age.

“When we show our videos to youths in Sarawak, we want them to see that they should not feel inferior; that they too can be among the best because it’s already been proven by their peers,” he said.

Jof explained that his group were still fine-tuning their approach, but he pointed out that ultimately they would want to show their video beyond Sarawak, to share with the world the stories of Sarawak’s youths.

The oldest member of Jof’s group is 19.

Meanwhile, 20-year-old Bethany Luhong Balan and her all-girl group are planning to come up with a book about all the races in Sarawak.

“Our focus is on the legends, life stories and interesting facts of all the races in Sarawak.

“We believe that our book is unique because we are trying to include all the races. I think it’s also unique because a bunch of youth is the brains behind this,” she said.

“Through our project, we also want to encourage our youths to appreciate the wisdom of their elders. We are calling our book project, ‘Borneo Birthright: Past and Present Unite’, because we are merging the wisdom and knowledge of the elders with the creativity and dynamism of the young,” she added.

The group hopes to preserve the cultures of Sarawak and also create awareness on the importance of preserving the heritage and stories of its people.

The group recently went on a trip to Sungai Asap to document the stories of longhouse elders, and Bethany explained that they are motivated to go to more places throughout the state in the coming months.

The last group is led by 25-year-old Mohd Hafeez Jeniri.

He revealed that the idea for their project was generated by a group member, who decided it would be cool to combine his love of video and online games with a cause.

In this case the cause chosen was to promote Sarawak as a tourism destination.

“Sarawak has a lot of interesting places and what we want to do is highlight the beauty of Sarawak; its people, its culture and food.

“We want people to be interested in Sarawak and her diversity through an online game; we want to get them excited about our state and we hope we can achieve that through our game,” said Hafeez.

Being in the presence of these youths is very dangerous to people who are set in their ways of doing things and content with ‘business-as-usual’.

Their enthusiasm and creativity is very infectious and will no doubt make people break out of their comfort zones and be innovative and creative as well. This augurs well for Sarawak in this ‘Year of Innovation and Creativity’.