My once supposed to be Ted Talk !

A few years ago, precisely 2017, I remember a friend recommended I submit a speech for a Ted event that was taking place in our city. For reasons I can't recall, I wasn't selected as a speaker. My goal was to talk about volunteerism from a different perspective and because of this rejection I almost believed that my idea wasn't good enough ! Today I was sitting in our garden and the writing came to my mind, it's about time I leave this doubt and share what I wanted to say.

Here's a little photo of what I was doing in the garden ;)

The writing I shared went as following:

You look around you and you have graduated, with really good grades and studied a very good specialty. Yet opportunities are not knocking on your doors!

You have been very good in school, you got higher grades than all and yet someone who got really low grades has better opportunities than you. You were very optimistic, with a very fixed mind that someone so smart should have opportunities running after him, having a list of opportunities and choosing one of them. But yet, nothing is happening ! You have no job, it’s been a few months now, and it’s leading to years even !

Some people believe that being successful means that opportunities will come after them, reality is: success is when you knock on the doors of opportunities until one opens.

This might make you feel like your role in the society is fading away, and it gets worse when you see that the society itself is living in a hard situation.

Here you need to understand what’s really happening, and how you can actually be a great source of positive changing.

Now, you can think about this scenario: your brain is out of your body and it's looking at you. Then now make it a bigger circle, and look at your whole society ! You see the society is made up of many institutions, each working differently but in the same time together. These institutions are very different in their work, but all work very closely together and that is to keep the society working in a state of equilibrium.

Because these agencies all work together, we can normally predict that any dysfunctioning in one of them, will cause automatic changes in all the others. Now if we apply this idea on our society now and all that's happening, we can put the dots together to have a clear picture of why is everything taking this specific direction.

We all know how it started right ? War happened, displacement followed, then what ? The dysfunctions in our security situation, caused changes and step by step in everything.

Imagine it as this figure (will be presented on a data show-today me don't remember which photo I was going to show) you see how the security was followed by political situations, then economy goes down... then where do you think are we now ? We are now in what can be considered probably the most sensitive stage, which is the influence on the social life. Now it's true, that hasn't been that much obvious till now, but do you think nothing will happen ?

Here's the thing: we are now at the stage where our social life might face challenges in the future, and the negative circle may go on negative ! This is definitely not something that we want to happen right ? We want the circle to have a dramatic positive change don't we ?

You might think now, that since all the institutions in the circle went on a negative direction, then maybe this one will just automatically follow and will not have a chance of changing.

Good news is: we can change !

Better news: you can be the reason !

The best news is: opposite to what you think, there is more than one way !!

Here, I'll not discuss all those ways, some should be for you to discover.

I'll tell you about something very simple, available and easy.

The most influential power now days, having a great influence in our society and I believe any society to be honest is civil society! The agencies, organizations and all the institutions are the ones building a lot of the social welfare of the society. You as young people, have a great opportunity to develop the society or change the destiny of the circle to a positive orientation. Many of whom can now days work with humanitarian organizations, are already doing what should be done.

But I understand that many of you will say, but we can't all be employed by these organizations and they don't give that opportunity to anyone.

Going back to what I said at the beginning: first, successful people look up for opportunities. Second, these opportunities don't all necessarily need to be paid by money, their goals can be more important than being paid money, they can pay experience!

It's very important for you to know, that what you are doing is not only for the sake of your financial well being, it's for a couple of more important things as well: these are your own development and experiences, and the positive changes we were talking about before.

Volunteering is something that is very much desired and requested by civil society agencies, one of the sacred purposes of Civil Activities is teaching the person how to give without necessarily expecting much. It's to teach the individual that "we" is more important than only "me". Organizations working in Duhok now, have opened many doors for volunteering in their offices. You get to directly interact with the society, people you have never met or known that some people live in such circumstances. Once you understand them, know the problems, you get to understand how important is what you're doing when you support them overcome their live challenges. Don't think about it as if you've changed the live of a person or a family. Think about it as if your changing the direction of the whole circle, you are re-directing what could be called the negative expected consequences into positive possible consequences.

And always remember: successful people knock on opportunities doors, now you think about it, which door are you willing to knock after you get out of here ?

After five years, is it still the same for me?

I have to admit that now and today, I do have some changes in this idea.

1- I have presented a structural functionalism idea, which is a theory I still have some believe in. However, does negative change in one institution necessarily lead to negative changes in all the structure ? Today me thinks not necessarily. It has happened that horrible events and changes, have led to positive changes.

2- Volunteerism is good enough for some time of your life, however it's not something sustainable. At some point, you need to get paid, and in such a difficult economic situation, volunteerism isn't really the best option. This in mind, I still believe it will introduce you to networks that will help you further to find suitable jobs.

At the end I would say, it's important to remember that experience can actually change our ideas a lot. What may make a lot of sense today, may not make any sense at all in a few years, or you may stick even harder to your ideas. Who knows?