Hi all~!

Today is the first day whereby we really officially interact with the Cambodians at Joko Center. We had 2 workshops today, both on self discovery. As mentioned by Joyce yesterday, serene and I were the facilitators for today's workshops.

The first workshop started off quite well with the Cambodians enjoying an ice-breaker we always play - wAcKo! But the mood died down a bit as we proceed into the 1st activity of the the workshop and which was that we might have anticipated it beforehand but we didnt. Along the way we improvised the activities, added new activity. Few things we have heard from othe stm groups that went Cambodia previously were that they are generally more reserved towards discussions and if you post them open ended questions, it may not hit on the intended effect of making them think. So what we did was they we got them to write down what they think on mahjong paper, eg. what are the things they find that they have certain difficulties in, areas they want to grow it, and after it share the ideas in the small groups they were divided into. They drew, wrote in Khmer, wrote in English, which ever they were comfortable in and best able to express what they think in.

Taking some of the lessons we learnt in the morning workshop, we took it to the afternoon workshop. Despite the fact that they may be reserved in front of people they do not know, they can be very open talking to us about their vulnerable sides and they depends on how deep the examples we gave them for the activities they did. For example, in the 1st workshop, we ask them what are the things they find difficult to grow in, so many wrote stuffs like not able to do maths etc; in the 2nd workshop, we gave examples like patience towards people and they wrote down stuffs that are deeper like no perseverance. So, as mentioned by Jullian, how deep they can go into depends on how deep we are able to lead the activities into. Which indeed we did see an improvement in the depth of the discussions held. PTL! examples are very important to help them understand the activities, life demostrations where possible will be great. Rapport building with the people helped them to open up a lot to share oso..

2nd workshop also showed better support and team work between the whole team. =) Mo4 Qi4 ah..

It was a first for me to have a translator, need to have some form of communication, eye contact with the translator so that he can support you better. but depends on the translator, may not need to eye contact if he's quite good. some original intended meaning may be gone with translation and we did face quite some problems with translation and understanding what we are saying.. sometimes the words we use may be too long or chim. happened that when we were saying "have a break after that", the translator literally took it as breaking some stuffs and he did the action of breaking, so need to be careful when using words with mulitple meanings.

another interesting thing was that we met this girl who is studying in 3 schools now. morning 7-11am she attends high school, 3-5pm she goes computer lessons, 5-8.30pm she goes university. and guess where is she 1-2pm? cycling to go computer lesson. sounds like some crazy schedule.. some of the people are quite generally very eager to learn and improve their lives..

Generally workshops objective of getting people comfortable and discovering more about themselves were met.

Something that touched me was that the Cambodians just openly come to us for comments about what we thought of them, for an activity where they were supposed to ask their friends what they think of them.how much they trust us.. think in singapore you will most probably never have people whom you just met asking you for comments on what you think of them..

Yesterday, Jullian mentioned that people really put in their all to build up the church last time, reminded me of the church building fund; where compared to the past they really poured out their savings to buy nexus. now with a bigger church (in terms of quantity), am I willing/able to go to the extend the people in the past went before?

- Wei Ling