Gender Equity was so far one of best the Explorations I have involved in. I think I was lucky enough to be in that project because I actually learned a lot of valuable and beautiful lessons. In Gender Equity we talked a lot about gender issues in our society like gender and violence, gender and economic, gender and culture, LGBTQ+ community, mental health, beauty standard, and more! Every day we would have a family discussion. It’s not just any discussion, it’s so powerful that we almost cry every day. We shared stories about our family, what we see now in our society, or what we used to experience. I learned a lot from others and somehow it brought us closer.
Every day, our teachers would show us some stories, poems, and videos to inspire us so that we could create creative pieces for our blog. We created a blog called CHANGE which stands for Creating Humanitarian Awareness for the Necessity of Gender Equity; there are some articles related to gender that some of us wrote, if you want to check it out please click on this link.
At the end of January during our Exploration, we created a Gender Summit where we invited schools around Phnom Penh to participate. There were over 100 high school students at the summit between January 28th and 29th. I was the press, so I didn’t really know much about the activities that they did but our team came together and create activities for each section based on the topic that they’d given. The topics were culture, language, economics, and power.
Through this experience, I think we were able to educate students especially those who are Cambodian on Gender Equity. We were able to shift some of their perspectives on gender ideas, for an example, women aren’t naturally a good caretaker, she learn it from her surroundings and that anyone can become a caretaker, it doesn’t have to be woman.
I hope we all continue fighting and even if we won’t be able to solve all the gender issues, I hope we as a person start to do something that could help. Don’t blame the society because we are part of society and it is part of our responsibility to make a change and save this world.
If you want to see the videos, please click watch below or on YouTube:
This is the documentary we made, but it is so long so it is okay if you won’t watch it.