“I saw people who held the world to higher expectations. Who held themselves to higher expectations. Inspiring rebels. People with real missions. Not a single orthodox career, nothing orthodox in what they were seeking to achieve. I’ve rarely been inspired by people in my industry, but I am inspired by people in the industry of peace. I was coming around to the idea that we are shaped by the people we spend time with, and that real life interactions were going to be the thing to humanize me. It was learning about their backgrounds, reading about their hopes and aspirations that made me feel this was a community I wanted to belong to: Not marks-driven, not grade-driven, but HEART-driven…”
Wempy joined Class 5 of Amsterdam’s THNK Creative Leadership Program.
“I went through quite a tough time during the period that I was going back and forth to Amsterdam. It was a time of war between Israel and the Palestinians. I found myself locked in my room in Jakarta crying a lot, not understanding what was happening in the world. I’m one of the most fortunate people in the world. You go on my Facebook page you’ll see I have friends from all sides of political conflict. I am Muslim but went to a mostly Jewish school. In high school, most of my friends were Christian. Being Muslim I feel connected to the world of Islam. Seeing what was happening to Palestinian kids, I was not able to contextualize what was happening in the world. Class 5 at THNK was a reflection of my universe: Christians, Jews, Muslims. In honour of diplomacy, we didn’t talk about the war. We shut everything off, which was hard. It was front page, front of people’s attention, but nobody talked about it, out of fear of religious or cultural collisions. But then we got in a circle, just our class, without teachers or facilitators, and we talked about it. We had a Palestinian member in our class and an Israeli. There was no grandstanding, no attempt to win any political points or ego points. We talked about non-violent communication. We talked how to manage peace, how to push it closer.”