Good evening, Greasers. I am leaving to Bosnia tomorrow for the project competition, and I should be very, very excited at the moment. But I am not.

I have been to many competitions before, from English debate to Astronomy Olympiad. What I like from these events is that you can really see for yourself how well you are compared with others. I like to think of it as a way of finding who I really am and what I want to do. At the end of the day, winning or losing doesn't really matter. You get to have the answer. You get a conclusion: "Oh well, my Math sucks, like it or not", or "Wow, I was born to debate!".

Which is why I don't really think about winning or losing before. What I do is preparing my best and try it out there.

But right now I can't stop thinking and wondering if it's all worth it. I don't know if the result of this competition is worth the effort I've put for this project. I am filled with burden. And here's the story.

Six months ago my senior friend, Yangki, asked me to be his partner for a Physics project. He talked about making a device that can detect tsunami. I was really excited. So along with three others, I started the project. We changed concept like changing clothes (which is really where the fun part was): Wheatstone bridge; Hall effect; Piezoresistive; and finally Capacitance-acceleration relation. I was responsible for the sensor, and the others were responsible for the transceivers and the computer program to project the wave on-screen (Borland Delphi).

Two months ago, we went Nationals. We presented the project in front of scientists, government officials, and students from all over the country. And yes, we won.

But what happened next was really shocking: it turns out that we have to pay for our plane tickets to Bosnia. I think it bears repeating WE HAVE TO PAY FOR THE PLANE TICKETS!

Maybe to my friends, two thousand dollars is no big deal. But to me it's a fortune. I got into this school through a scholarship. I lived with my retired grandparents. I was already a burden and I don't know how I can come up with that much money in a month.

So I looked for sponsors-and they paid about half of it. And still, seven million rupiah, for my Grandparents, was too much. But they somehow got it and here I am holding my plane tickets and packing my bags.

What disappoints me the most is my government's carelessness in this. We represent Indonesia in an international event, and what we bring here is a device that is possibly a solution to prevent a deadly catastrophe. Whatever happened to those words about "education being our top priority" that was written on your campaign posters?

This is too much burden for me. So forgive me for thinking that winning is the only option, because it's the only way to maybe pay the small fortune that cost my family.

And sorry for the bad English too.