Hundreds of Students Celebrate International Youth Day

Denpasar (Antara Bali) - Around 200 high school students from Bali took part in the celebration of International Youth Day (IYD) 2010, here on Thursday.

Dr Wayan Sayoga, Anand Ashram foundation chairman,  said the IYD celebration highlighted with a workshop themed "Youth Challenges and Empowerment", was aimed at empowering the young people by first knowing their own potentials.

The IYD 2010 was organized by Anand Ashram foundation in cooperation with the Bali Regional Education and Sports Office,

"The activity's objective is  to help the young people know their own potentials which could be empowered for the interests of our nation and country," Sayoga said on the sidelines of the activity.

He explained that when entering the free market in 2015, the Indonesian youth would face challenges especially of how they would be able to compete in various fields.

He said if they could not anticipate those challenges, they would only be spectators in their own country.

"If the youth don't want to be spectators in our own country, they must first improve their capabilities and creativity before the free market era arrives," he said.

Whereas, on the benefits of the workshop program, he said it was for enabling the youth to be holistically healthy, smart and responsible, building their self-confidence and being able to select the right actions and avoid the wrong ones.

The most important thing was to make the youth aware of their potential as early as possible, he said.

The head of Bali Regional Education and Sports Office, AA Ngurah Gde Sujaya, said he welcomed the activity because it would help the youth empower themselves through the potential that they possess.

"In the future, the youth must have positive thinking and disregard differences so that they would be able to give meanings to their lives and be useful for our nation and country," he stressed.(*)