Last month Laura (Hammersley) and I were given the opportunity to visit Phnom Penh. Previously, all my communication with partner organisations had been emails or temperamental Skype conversations, so the most rewarding part of our visit was definitely meeting each of our Cambodian partners. It was also Laura’s and my first opportunity to visit Cambodia so the challenges of negotiating roads in a tuk tuk, eating some great food and doing a tiny bit of sightseeing was an added bonus!
As well as meeting with each organisation separately we held a ‘Classroom of Many Cultures’ (CoMC) workshop. This workshop was based on one previously run by Kate (Lloyd) at Macquarie University for the CoMC project team. In Cambodia we invited each of our partner organisations (ACF, AIJI and LAC), AVI in-country managers (Lina and Leo) and Sam from the Pace International office, to join Laura and I in an afternoon workshop. We divided the participants into three groups and as a warmup activity, asked them to work together and describe ‘how to make tea’ using post-it notes. Participants were supposed to do this in complete silence!
