Take Ur Daughter 2 Work Day

International Women's Day was March 8. I decided in February that I wanted to plan a Take Your Daughter to Work Day for girls in Battambang province. Apparently, planning an event takes a lot of work (who knew?). So I and one of the Volunteers in Battambang town, Kristine, scrambled for several weeks to put this thing together. Our vision was to bring about 12 girls (3 from each of the Volunteers' high schools)to Battambang town to meet with successful women in different career paths in order to get them thinking about what they might want to do in the future.

A fantastic local NGO, Aphivat Strey (Women's Development), helped get the logistics in order, and we got funding from several different local sources. A lot more planning had to go into the event than I ever expected: we needed to rent a van to get from one place to another within the city, find transport for the girls from their small towns to Battambang, secure a venue to do short debriefing sessions at the beginning and end of the day, buy snacks, and find small gifts for the hosting organizations. Oh, and also ask 4 professional women to talk to a group of high-school students about their own jobs and experiences. In the end, the students got to visit the Regional Teacher Training Center (where junior-high teachers are trained to teach English, chemistry, Khmer, etc.), whose director is a woman; Digital Divide Data, whose local director is a woman; Emergency Hospital, where there are many female doctors and nurses; and ANZ Royal Bank, whose tellers are mostly women.

Not everything went perfectly according to plan, but the students' eyes were opened about their many different options after high school. At the RTTC, they toured classrooms and learned about how one gets admitted to the RTTC. Here are the girls in a biology classroom.



At Digital Divide Data, the director told them how important it is to make career goals and related this to her own career path. The students also met some of the employees, who do data entry for Western institutions and get computer training.

Emergency hospital, which is run by an Italian NGO and cares mostly for trauma patients, generously provided lunch for us. The students took a complete tour of the hospital (including all the wards) with an Italian doctor. Later, a Cambodian woman told them the story of how she had grown up in poverty but had worked hard to become a nurse.



And here are the students listening to the manager of the local branch of ANZ Royal Bank. This is one of the things that wasn't exactly according to plan: they were supposed to meet with a teller but the manager just ended up telling the girls that women are better employees than men. He also ended up telling them how banking works, since most Cambodians in villages use jewelry as their bank.



We all had a great time. The students had never visited any of these workplaces before, and they seemed to enjoy being in the "big" city. Their enjoyment fueled the Volunteers' enthusiasm, and we got to feel like we were doing something important. Personally, this event is the single thing I have enjoyed most since arriving in Cambodia, and I wish I could do something like it every day.