Khema : Reflecting Women’s role in Buddhism!!!!

Hello Khmer New Year Season!!!! It was a fun and great time for family reunion at the pagodas! We have enjoyed listening to the monk preaching us to do good things, to follow up with the principle to reach peace and to contribute society that we are living through doing work, donating to social projects, helping each other and so on. As I have been observing that nuns, which are females, have only been the assistant of the monk in this mission by preparing the food, arranging the place, facilitating the communication of people and monks and playing other roles that facilitate the monks’ work, but not directly taking the leading role in preaching people. I started to reflect what have been their role in this field of Buddhism? How about in the past? Why women have been only assisting, but not being the leading person to preach the message? Has there been discrimination against women leadership in Buddhism religion?

So I googled as I came back home to figure out my wonders and found this article giving a contrasting view points to my skeptics. According to “Buddha net” site , “Buddhism does not restrict either the educational opportunities of women or their religious freedom.

I am a young Cambodian girl! I can win scholarship and compete in the high education abroad, so can YOU!!!

Happy Birthday to me!!!! Another year older! hehehe…..
Here’s my interview with the UC’s Writing Alliance,as my Birthday Gift to you! Enjoy!! =)

The original source of article is: http://writingalliance.blogspot.com/2011/11/student-wins-scholarship-to-study.html

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Sunday, November 20, 2011
Student Wins Scholarship to Study Abroad in France
By San Boromeichan

Nara Sokhema, a Term VIII student majoring in economics at the University of Cambodia (UC), was recently selected as a recipient of the Erasmus Mundus Mobility with Asia (EMMA) program, which allows her to study in France for one semester. EMMA is an exchange program between universities in the European Union (EU) and Asia, and is sponsored by the EU Commission in partnership with Royal University of Phnom Penh (RUPP).
Khema will attend the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis in Nice, France, for six months starting in September 2011. She plans to take courses in economics, and all of her courses will be conducted in French.

She said she is very excited to have an opportunity to study in France because it has always been her dream to study in Europe, but she also expressed some concern. She said that some of her family members are very conservative and do not believe daughters should travel far away from home, even if they are pursuing higher education. Seeing this as an important opportunity to grow and develop, Khema reasoned with her family to convince them to let her go, and after much discussion, her family finally approved.

“I am so thrilled and look forward to learning about education, lifestyles, and development in France, as well as customizing the lessons learned and applying these new ideas to help develop Cambodia” said Khema. “I also feel a bit scared because I have to be a good representative of my country to compete with students in the developed world.”

Helping yourself and others seeing things from different perspectives!

Let’s try a new work!!!!! In the search to find out what you really want to do for life, you sometime gotten to try it out and see how you feel about it!!!!

This year, I challenge myself to do a new type of work I had never done before, which is to be a reporter or so called Journalist!!!! In spite of the super busy time with at least 4 main volunteer work with 4 different youth groups and NGOs, I take this task as a challenge to my time management skill, and see how much i can manage to do them all in the 24 hours days to learn something new, while holding on with my passion in contributing to the society.

Joining the Writing Alliance with at my University of Cambodia is a wonderful experience!!!!! I love my advisor! She is wonderful, incredibly talented, helpful, nice, and she has been teaching me so much about writing skills, professional ethnics, reflection skills, approaching people skill, viewing issues from different eagles and responding to life as a whole!! I am glad I made this absolutely right decision to take this work knowing that my two hands are already too full to take more tasks.

Being reporter has taught me about the sense of curiosity and eagerness to learn and find out the fact that impacts the life of the interviewee and their society as a whole. I have learned so much about