A one life time experience
I think that every time you get together with people from different cultures you learn a lot, but I never thought it would be at the level we did in Malaysia. It was really a life time experience. We not only visited a very far away country with different architecture, different food and beautiful landscapes but also we meet and made friendship with people not only physically different but also who see the world and go through life in a very different way.
I stayed there for four weeks studying at the MTCP course 'Integrated environmental planning and management' where we met people from all over the world, including Egypt, India, Bhutan, Timor Leste, Bosnia and countries I have never heard before like Burkina Faso and Lesotho from Africa.
Among the course objectives was to expose participants to the environmental planning and management in Malaysia, promote understanding and collaboration within countries in handling environmental issues and provide a forum for practitioners to share knowledge and exchange experiences. Objectives which I think at the end of the course were fulfilled completely.
In a regular day we had classes consisting in lectures given by officers from the government or the academic sector, all of whom were related with the environmental management in Malaysia. We started at 8:30 in the morning until 6 or 7 in the afternoon and after that we could either eat dinner at the cafeteria or go downtown to tour around the city, which was often my choice because Kuala Lumpur is be one of the most impressive cities in the world. The city has a very unusual combination of high technology and modern structures like the Petronas Twin Towers, the monorail and the telecommunication tower with less contemporaneous and more traditional temples and neighborhoods of the three main religious of the country, the Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists. Within few blocks you can find a mosque, a Chinese temple and a Hindu temple as well as people of these different cultures in their traditional attires.
In my course we were lucky to have one entire week on a field trip, leaving Kuala Lumpur to go all the way through the west coast until the border with Thailand. We spent the first night in Perak, in the Matang Mangrove forest, which is recognized as the best mangrove, management in the world. We don't have mangroves in Chile so for me, as a forester, was a unique experience. After the mangrove, we went to see some enterprises doing some interest rubbish management and then we went to learn about the management of protected areas at the Penang National park and Pulau Payar Marine Park, two amazing places where we had the opportunity to know them by boat trips and by long walks through beautiful forests and paradisiacal beaches. We also dove with multicolor fishes in warm waters, what else could we ask for?
The week after our return from the field trip we went to a rehabilitation center for elephants at Kuala Gandah, where we had the great opportunity of riding an elephant, which I think is one of the moments that will be kept in the memory of every participant, along with the sensation of having for one month an extraordinary experience with new friends I believed I will never forget and I hope to keep in contact with for a long time from now.
Ms. Claudia Silva
Research Asistant
University of Chile, Santiago, Chile
(attended Integrated Environmental Planning Management at National Institute of Public Administration (INTAN) from 19 June - 18 July 2008)
In a Chinese Temple
With a "piton" in the city of Melaka
In Penang National Park
In the biggest mosque of Eastern Asia
With my friends from Southamerica and the Petronas Towers
On a lecture in the field trip
Riding an elephant in the rehabilitation centre
At one of the many beautiful beaches
www.kln.gov.my/perwakilan/santiago