The fourth talk I attended was by a wildlife conservationist Dr Tammie Matson. She spoke about her journey in advocating for the protection in Wildlife, namely elephants in Rwanda, and how she got there. She spoke about how she had been passionate about wildlife conservation from when she was 15 and had gone on a trip to Africa. I found myself relating to her when she spoke as I too have an interest in animals and wildlife conservation. She talked about some of her experiences in dealing with animals in their natural habitats and her most memorable moments. From the questions that we asked, she said that she thought Education was the key to wildlife conservation. If people get educated then a large portion of protection for animals would get solved. I didn’t find this talk as interesting as it could have been but overall I quite enjoyed it.

The third talk I attended as meant to be by a rock climber but he didn’t make an appearance so we had Dr Sweeting (an English teacher in our school) talk to us about his experience where he got rescued from a fatal natural disaster. He and his old friend Tom had gone on a trip to Myanmar. Tom was a very impulsive adventurous type who was also extremely charming so things usually went his way which is why Dr Sweeting agreed to go up near a refugee camp for the Rohingya people on an 18 hour bus ride for Tom to meet the refugees and interview people as in that village lived two people who were the last speakers of a specific language and they were around 80 so the language was going to be dead soon. At this point, I was questioning Dr Sweeting’s trust in his friend as it seemed that he blindly followed his friend. Heavy rain began to fall and a flood started to make its appearance but Dr Sweeting still followed his friend to interview these two speakers. It eventually got so bad that it was declared a crisis by the President of Myanmar and Dr Sweeting and Tom had just barely managed to catch the bus back to the city and it was a very rocky and dangerous journey where he was sure that he was going to die. He eventually made it back home and made a promise to himself to never embark on a journey like that again which could risk his life in such a way. I asked him if he thought it was a good idea to have such blind trust in someone and he responded by saying that he didn’t think that anyone should have that much trust in anything or anyone. He had followed Tom as he’d known him for 15 years and things generally always worked out with Tom. I thought that this was a very interesting talk on risk-taking journeys and the amount of trust you should have in someone. Overall I thoroughly enjoyed this talk as I liked the aspect of danger and panic that the story contained.

The second talk I attended was by a resident teacher here at UWCSEA (Mrs Pauline Sharry). She shared her experience in fostering children and when sometimes things don’t work out. She and her husband had applied to be short term foster parents and had figured that as they were already teachers fostering children shouldn’t be much different or harder which is what I would’ve thought as well if I was in her position. They ended up receiving a 6-year old boy in need of an emergency home. And ended up fostering him for about 11 months. She spoke about how even though she loved him he became too much, he would constantly act out and cause trouble and they had realized it was because the boy had genuinely thought that he didn’t deserve their love or anything they gave him. It became so bad that Mr and Mrs Sharry decided to stop fostering him and he ended up going to another foster home. I wasn’t too big of a fan of this talk as I can’t understand how you can love a child for 11 months then give him up so he has to live with another family. After the talk, I understood that fostering for a child and being a teacher are two very different jobs that demand very different things from the respective person doing the job and I have huge respect for Mrs Sharry for caring for children who need a home.

The first talk I had the chance to attend was by a visiting criminal psychologist. I was quite surprised by his appearance as he seemed extremely young and I had been expecting someone older with more experience. Once he began speaking, however, I was intrigued by his experiences working with criminals and working in the justice system. He spoke about his time monitoring convicts in rehabilitation programmes and how his perspective on courses like that changed and how they really helped the convicts generally. He also spoke about how going into the interview the convicts had become almost methodical for him, it had become part of his daily routine so he’d feel generally calm even around the felons that had committed the worst crimes. He also told us how he identified whether or not people were lying which really interested me as it was so different than we were exposed to by the media. I then asked him a question on whether or not he had been deceived by any of the convicts he had interviewed and he proceeded to tell us quite a graphic story about a time where he had a judged a convict based on his appearance. The criminal he was interviewing was quite similar to him in the sense that they were both near the same age and appearance wise as well there weren’t too many large differences so he hadn’t expected him to have committed any crime too serious. He revealed that the man had actually been convicted because he had several thousand videos of filming up girl’s clothes and one day he had ended up grabbing the girl. Later when reading the convict’s file, he found out that the girl was only 8 years old. He told us about how he had let himself be deceived by the man’s appearance into thinking that he couldn’t have committed a serious crime but in reality, it was the opposite. Overall this was my favourite talk as it sparked discussion into topics that can generally be seen as taboo in society (mental health, certain graphic crimes).