Intercultural understanding has always been something that draws my attention since I was a young girl- very young that the thought of going outside of my country did not exist in my mind. I did not know that intercultural understanding could be an area that someone could be interested in, or even actually “study” it. Saying that I’m interested in “peacebuilding” is definitely not something so common back in my home country.
My name is Ploy Kongkapetch, I grew up in a big city in Thailand called Korat. I remember growing up I spent a lot of time reading; I read all the time. When I got big enough to go around by myself the only place I would go to is the library or the bookstore, I did not know what kind of books I enjoy reading because I did not know what the genre was; but the only thing I know was that, I read everything that is about different people and their cultures. I was always curious to learn about the different ways that people lives their lives, life with the snow, life with tribal song, life with haunting, life with farming. I was really interested in knowing more and more, sometimes when I reach the end of each book I would get the feeling of “oh no, please don’t be it, I want to know more” I could go on and on about them. This also links me to what I want to do in the future; I want to work with diverse youth and to have the opportunity to learn from them, to create the environment where they feel comfortable sharing and exploring culture differences.
After I finished my high school in Hong Kong, I have decided to take a gap year with Global Citizen Year, a bridge year program where they offer opportunities to high school graduates to go and live aboard to learn more about themselves before starting college; which later would help to maximize the benefits of going to college. I was living with a local host family in an indigenous community in Ecuador. My apprenticeships were in a local government office where I assisted the after-school programs for children in the community as well as working with the elderly group. I was also working in a local primary school where I give Art classes. I have overcome a lot of obstacles during the year; apart from the language barrier, there was a lot of cultural miscommunication as well. At first I thought I had a pretty good preparation for the year as a UWC alumni but I was very wrong. Being in a country where I was surrounded by locals was very different than being in UWC. I also have posted some blogs there if you are interested in learning more about me.
Here is a video showing a bit of what I was upto in Ecuador:
It was hard expressing my interests to people back home then, not a lot of people are into what I was interested in, not a lot of people see the beauty of diversity like the way I saw it until I went to United World Colleges. When I first found out about what UWC really was, It stunted me. They squeeze the world into one school, into one room and as well put the world into the classrooms; I knew I wanted to be a part of this, which I was lucky enough to be the only one from Thailand chosen to attend UWC back in 2013. I also got the opportunity to do a verbatim theatre project when I was there, Verbatim theatre is a form of documented theatre in which plays are presented to the audience from the exact words spoken by people interviewed about a particular event or topic; the topic for that year was ex-offenders. I was pretty scared that I have to work so closely with the group of people whom I was not at all comfortable with, even though we had a lot of training about how to conduct an interview with them I was still pretty nervous. However, my partner was extremely sweet. We had a nearly 3 hour interview and it was one of the most memorable moments I have ever had in my life. She also came to the play where I performed and using her words, I remember she was crying by the end of the show and had no ideas that her story could even be something else more than just a story, she did not know that I could learn so much from it. It has been over two years and we still keep in touch from time to time.
There was one thing that I could never read when I was young; the story that has anything to do with violence. I would skip the page or scroll down really quick when I saw even a glimpse of a photo of the victims of a war or a photo of protests, this was not the kind of ‘different lives’ I enjoy exploring, it gives me a weird feeling of stomach ache inside my body, it makes me feel sad and guilty of living the life with no violence. However, spending two years of school that has a mission of building a more peaceful future has helped to learn about it, we talked about it, in both formal and informal settings. I started to look at it little by little, observed what people really has to say. I hate that I eventually had to admit that conflict is real, violence is happening and there are innocent victims. I realized that I can never learn about different people or truly master intercultural understanding without learning about violence, conflicts and how to solve them. During last January term, I had decided to take the course called Crisis Intervention and Interpersonal Violence. The class was pretty small and we spent about 30 hours a week for the training, I had a variety range of classmates, they were nursing, law enforcement, athletic training, teaching students. We all believed that no matter which points we are in the society, we will be affected and experience some kind of conflicts and violence and it is important that we are all aware about it.
I hope that the Summer Peacebuilding Program would help me to learn more about conflicts and peace building from a bigger level prespective. I am very excited to immerse myself into this summer program, in order for me to maximize my potential and become a better Global Citizen.
