Cambodia was a different experience, a magical experience, and the first experience I had of its kind.

This was our first experience facilitating a workshop for a non-English-speaking community where non of us spoke the language; Khmer, and it was super challenging. The goal was to support the participants get engaged in Cambodia’s National Biodiversity Strategic Action Plan and rally them to implement the Kunming—Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. We wowed ourselves by promising to simplify and make the content accessible by minimising technical jargon, and man, oh man, we did it.

I was quite surprised by how slow I spoke and how simple I sounded. Nadia and Mark Liao simplified the already simplified Systems practice over many days and nights, thinking and re-thinking. Mark Raquino adopted storytelling techniques for the socio-ecological crisis, and it was magical. I used a magic potion for target 22, simplifying the content of KMGBF and trying out a participants-centred model. I learned my approach brought something beyond my expectations; it was experimental and was a success; we learned from them; they learned from themselves and each other, and that is where the magic happened.

Our power was in how flexible we were, how sensitive we were, how empathetic we were, how hardworking we were, how serious we were about our work ethic and how strongly we wanted inclusivity to be applicable.

One approach to inclusivity was to have local youth facilitators as a bridge and train them to achieve the goals. I am still surprised by the power I saw in the team-building. They were amazing and powerful.

I am grateful for everything I learned from the team; Mark Liao , Mark Reopta Raquino and Nads. I am grateful for the amazing teamwork and for the work culture built by the Global Youth Biodiversity Network (GYBN) over the past 14 years as well as Mark’s perfect leadership and, very specifically, the mind maps. I am thankful for the lovely hosting and the flexibility of the sponsor, Danmission Cambodia. Working with youth from the Cambodia Youth Network (CYN) and Youth Council of Cambodia (YCC) was a great pleasure.

Cambodia was magical; it has the magic we all Asians carry, in a unique way; the power of culture, power of food, power of spices, power of recourses, power of the roots of harmonious religions. But it also has its failures through facing many wars in the past, corrupted leadership, failures of broken systems and beautiful people with less access to the outside world.

Education has its unique power to improve people’s lives. Education with a connection to nature and people’s hearts, with empathy at its core, can do magic.

We left Cambodia with a heart full of gratitude to everyone who dreams of a future of living in harmony with nature. This is also my personal love letter to the younger generation who dreams of a better world.