Two weeks in Thailand. Part two...

One of the two teams taking part in the disaster planning simulation....

After a weekend of setting up and final conference plans, plus eating lots of Thai food inc seafood, which I LOVE (I must have had Tom Yum soup every day for 10 days!), Sunday night rolled round and on the opening evening for the conference we held a photo competition and official dinner/speeches, with an exhibition displaying each of the WV country offices submissions. The subject was HIV/AIDS and some powerful photos and captions were on display as everyone wandered around wearing their national dress.

I surprised people by wearing my saree, having decided before to dress in my current national dress from India...this made the WV India team very proud! Besides apart from a Morris dancer outfit or some Union Jack shorts (never going to happen) there isn’t really a UK national outfit (not an English one anyway)!

Our special guest speaker was an 11-year-old boy from Cambodia who is HIV positive and has lost both his parents. He moved all of us to tears, but inspired at the same time. He was just a typical young lad in many ways who WV Cambodia were supporting with his brother, but had been through so much and again reminded us all that children are our priority and helping them use their voice to tell their stories.

One of the photos I took while in a World Vision community programme...hasn't she got a great smile!

The week itself was great, despite early starts and late nights as per usual conference mode - it was a great time of learning, sharing and getting to know each other. Overall around 14 plus Asia Pacific countries were represented in the week. Another encouraging aspect was meeting some of the teams I have worked with in the past four/five months and have them say how they appreciated it, felt supported and have seen good work outputs/learnings.

However one of the sad things of being in Pattaya, a tourist resort where WV also has some projects, was seeing so many white, western older men with very young, pretty Thai girls and boys. It is easy to generalise and judge, but nine times out of ten it probably is sex exploitation. At the same time many of the Thai men and women were controlling the situation, earning some money and waiting for the next flow of tourists to fly in.

During the week I was speaking at and managing a few seminars, as well as making sure with Katie and James that the conference ran smoothly - so at times I was feeling a little out of my comfort-zone. But with prayer (!) and lots of preparing/planning, I felt my sessions and entire week went really well with good involvement and feedback.

Here's a couple of pix from the week...

The Asia Pacific regional communications team posing... Katie, me and James.