Another day, Another ACD

March 07, 2020

I'm writing this post mainly about Saturday the 7th of March. Saturdays are the day we have our team meeting and Active Citizenship Day (ACD).

This week it was lead by Cheyenne and Boray, and they chose Sustainable Development Goal 5 - Gender Equality. This relates to equal rights for women and girls.

Cheyenne and Boray introducing their SDG

Some of the stats that we learned include:

Investing in education programs for girls increases the age at which they marry and returns $5 for every $1 spent
4 out of 5 human trafficking victims are female
In 18 countries, husbands can legally prevent wives from working
32% of parliamentarians are female, which has doubled since 1995
49 countries lack laws protecting women against domestic violence
Women own 13% of agricultural land
66% of the 781 million illiterate people are female

Cheyenne and Boray's ACD involved a presentation on the SDG, a true or false quiz about some of the stats I mentioned and some time linking the goals together.

Here are some photos of the linking exercise:

We did the exercise in counterpart pairs, so this is Alex, Chealy, Sokmeng and Zaynab (behind Chealy) explaining their linking poster...

... and this is Tey and Olivia, Tim and Heng explaining theirs

I think whenever we do these ACDs, the counterpart pair leading them feel worried about presenting to the rest of us. This is is partly because it can be a scary thing to present to the group, especially for the Khmer if they have to speak in English. A lot of preparation goes into the ACDs - they're supposed to be 2 hours long, which is quite a daunting amount of time to keep everyone engaged (Channa and my ACD is not for 4 weeks). It's also because the leading pair can worry that people aren't interested and are frustrated by giving their time to ACDs, when we have so much other work to do and little free time.

But we discussed this during MPR. We talked about ACDs and shared our opinions, and we all find them very interesting. The information we learn is the kind of stuff that everyone should be interested in and know some of, because it's part of living in and caring about this world. And so far, the counterpart pairs have been very good at coming up with engaging activities, so that we don't just stare at a presentation for two hours. It's also nice to focus on subjects that don't come up in our daily work, within an office setting, and have a chance to learn what a particular two team members care about. I hope you are enjoying learning some of the facts we learn too.

After the ACD and team meeting we went to Zaynab's to cook vegetables for lunch, and then during the afternoon my subteam had our 3rd session at a local High school.

Disappointingly, we only had one member. The high school is quite a distance to travel for one person - it's the same place as I mentioned before when we only had three people. Last week we were trying to think of ways to solve this issue - a lot of our potential students aren't able to come every week because they are high school students with exams - and then we had six people. This week, after having just one, we are back to thinking of solutions. We have been thinking of running some kind of workshop, where we cover the main points of our sessions in three hours, or something similar, at a time when lots of people could make it. If it was a one off, maybe more people would come.

Meanwhile, the session we run on Thursdays has gone from two to one to three students, so we are going to start making some posters advertising it and spread them around the community and in local schools.

I feel quite positive about our subteam work right now. There are frustrations within the sessions and things don't always run smoothly, but we seem to have found a groove within our subteam. We know what we're doing, we know when it needs to be done by, we are all productive. We all care about the work. (I know that this is not necessarily the case in other subteams and subcommittees, so I feel grateful for my team members)

After work last night then Channa and I went home. Some people who I have been in contact with will already know how loud the lizards can be. There's one large type of gecko (I think that's what it is) which the Khmer call tokhai. It makes a really loud noise which is somewhere between a frog and a donkey (hard to explain, but if you're curious ask my parents to play you a recording I sent my family, or message me and I'll see if I can send you it). Anyway, today I saw it on the side of the house and took some videos and photos.

Its about the same length as my forearm. All the other geckos are between 1-4 inches long. I tried to show Channa the photo I took and she screamed and ran away. She doesn't like the tokhai.

My sleep continues to be disturbed by various things, including the lizards. This morning I woke at 4.40 because the latest Busdhist festival had begun, and wherever it's happening they broadcast it throughout the rest of the community on loud speakers. So the chanting or ceremonial music is fairly inescapable. I wish I'd brought earplugs! Thankfully my TL brought a lot of spares so I jammed some in and went back to sleep until my little brother woke me up at 7: