On Friday, January 24th, our academics intern, Emily Wang, gave a wonderful lecture on her volunteering experiences in Mongolia and Cambodia.
She begins the lecture by asking the audience, “What’s the happiest moment of your life?”, which is a very deep and complicated question to ask anyone. She continues by saying, “I’m young and I don’t have a lot of experience, but the happiest moments in my life were when I visited Mongolia and Cambodia.”
She went to these two countries to volunteer to help kids with disabilities! How awesome is that?!
She first visited Mongolia in July, 2012.
Mongolia is the second largest landlock country in the world. The people there are nomadic, which means that they have no fixed home and move according to the seasons from place to place in search of food, water, and grazing land. They live in circular tents and have no bathrooms in the house. Emily said, whenever she needed to use the bathroom, she had to tell her host family, “I want to go see the horses!”
Soon after, in February of 2013, Emily visited Cambodia.
The older population in Cambodia lack education, and there are a lot of incidences where young girls were sold into slavery. Emily’s role was to promote education and teach young students about their rights.
When she was in Cambodia, she could see that people were missing a lot of basic things that we take for granted, like shoes and especially water. There is a big water shortage in Cambodia, and a lot of the children looked very dirty because they didn’t have enough water to wash their hands and clothes. Many people get sick very easily because of that.
Emily loves to travel and help other people. These volunteer programs allowed her to do both! She got to learn about different cultures and languages as well as share hers.
At the end of her lecture, she said, “I believe in power in education. Education is a start point to other opportunities.”
We agree with you, Emily!
So come learn with us in LA! Come learn basic English in Los Angeles! You’ll get to meet people from all over the world with experiences like Emily’s!