Rev. Hikari led both of our morning sessions, on “Learning Human Reality through History”, and “Communication and Conflict Resolution”. For our first session, we researched on wars, genocides, significant events, and women’s rights from the 1900s until 2015. We learned that although we cannot change the past, we must be aware of what happened in order to stay away from making the same mistakes. It was extremely relevant as we had just visited the Killing Fields, Tuol Sleng, and the Royal Palace yesterday. We learned that we have been given the present and the future to make change, and that the dash between our birth and death dates is what is most important, as we can choose what we do with our one life.

In the afternoon, we had two more sessions on “Peace building” and “Being a Peacemaker”. We learned that women have a special role to play in society, and we God rejoices when we live in harmony despite our differences. At the end of the fourth session, we learned and danced to the song “Break the Chain” wearing black shirts and orange bands. We learned about Thursdays in Black and “Orange the world,” which is a yearly 16-day campaign, both raising awareness against gender-based violence. It was great to participate in these with this group of women leaders as well as being a fun way to seal what we have learned and begin our journey’s together as peacemakers in our communities, our countries, and our world.

Our teammate, Suzuna, was feeling sick so she unfortunately could not join all of the seminars. But thankfully, she was well enough to join us for part of the dinner.
At night, we had a farewell celebration dinner which began with worship and a bonfire. I believe we all had hearts overflowing with thanks to God as we reflected on the week and sang “How Great Thou Art” in Khmer, English, and our other languages. We then each added a stick of wood, which was symbolic of the big fire we can build when we work together, rather than burning alone.