A Canadian, a Thai, a Japanese and others walked into a Mexican restaurant…

Cynthia Saxena's Journey:

A Canadian, a Thai, a Japanese and others walked into a Mexican restaurant…

UNICEF EAPRO Education team at a Mexican Restaurant

As a celebratory dinner for the Regional Education Adviser, the Education team at UNICEF East Asia and Pacific (EAPRO) all headed to a restaurant. The Education team, a diverse and gender-balanced one, is comprised of individuals from all around the world. So on the day of the dinner, a Canadian, a Thai, a Japanese, a Mexican, two Americans, a French, and a Bosnian walked into a Mexican restaurant – it doesn’t get any more diverse than that. 

Working as a Junior Professional Consultant (JPC) at UNICEF EAPRO in Bangkok, Thailand has been a learning experience in many ways. As part of the Education team at UNICEF as well as the Secretariat for the United Nations Girl’s Education Initiative (UNGEI), not only am I exploring the workings of the UN but also learning a lot about how people from all over the world come and work together on the shared goal of achieving the SDGs agenda to improve the world for children.

On a broad macro view, with the acceleration of globalization, diversity and inclusion are becoming even more essential dimensions of society for ensuring that intercultural dialogues can occur for finding innovative sustainable development approaches, strengthening social cohesion, and exercising universally recognized human rights in a democratic governance model. These types of benefits associated with cultural diversity start with a diverse population.

After living in Toronto and the GTA, I thought I understood what multi-culturalism meant. In Canada, although I met people from all over the world with very different ethnicities, religions, languages etc., we were all still ‘Canadian’ at the end of the day – either us or our parents were immigrants, our accents were mostly the same, we used the same famous Toronto slang, drank too much Iced Coffee from Tim Hortons, and were very loyal to Drake and the Toronto Raptors. Despite having different backgrounds, cultures, and religion/language, we all were integrated together in this ‘Canadian’ identity.

         BTS Skytrain in Bangkok

Although Bangkok might be smaller in size than Toronto, it’s population, however, is three times of it (2.93 million in Toronto versus 8.3 million in Bangkok). Its residents include not only local Thais, but people from neighbouring countries like Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia, other people from the Global South, as well as far-fetched ‘expats’ from Europe, Oceania and North America. It’s a country mixed with fusions of different cultures – at one single shop I can find American fried rice, green curry pasta, as well as Thai milk-tea cupcakes. In Bangkok, unless of the obvious indicators (such as google maps, fanny packs, the famous ‘elephant pants’, etc.) you truly cannot tell whether the non-Thai person sitting beside you on the BTS is a tourist or an expat who has been living here for years. Unlike in Canada where people have their own cultural identities as well as the conforming ‘Canadian’ identity, Bangkok doesn’t demand that.                        

The diversity present at UNICEF EAPRO is a productive avenue to understand the multi-culturalism of Bangkok.

With a UNESCO intern at APMED highlighting SDG4: Quality Education

Inclusivity is at the core of the SDG Agenda 2030 and the EAP UNGEI Network is dedicated to strengthening gender equality in education by pledging its commitment to advancing progress towards SDG 4 and SDG 5, in particular. To support this initiative, I have been given the chance to attend and even serve as Rapporteur in many conferences on a range of topics 

around inclusive education such as:

• ·         Early Childhood Development
• ·         Inclusion, Mobility and Multi-Lingual Education
• ·         ASEAN Out-of-School Children and Youth
• ·         5^th Asia-Pacific Meeting on Education 2030 (APMED)

Cultural diversity and inclusivity at UNICEF not only exists at the large-scale programme level, but is also ingrained in their management culture. My unicef email always receives new job opportunities from our HR representative which ends with “This is a pivotal time for qualified female candidates who are interested in taking a leadership role to apply, as we are committed to achieving gender parity in senior level positions.”

I am quite often cc-ed into emails that include conversations in a completely different language, forcing me to utilize google translate to understand the context. An Education colleague who speaks multiple languages always ends his emails with a different translation of ‘thank you’ – ‘merci’ ‘gracias’ ‘grazie mille’ etc. Two other Education colleagues effortlessly switch back and forth between English and French when speaking with each other while two others switch between English and Spanish. I’ve heard so many different pronunciations of my name and met people who are able to say my last name correctly at their first try and others who struggle to pronounce it correctly due to the ‘x’ present in it.

To advance UNICEF’s efforts of being more environmentally friendly, our office was renovated to make it more ‘green’ and to encourage more cross-sectoral collaborations by transforming it into an open concept work-space. Not only is this good for the environment, but it is also good for the work culture as it promotes constructive dialogue to occur between these diverse decision-makers, reflecting the varied wealth of expertise, opinions, and values present. Even our fifth floor (where the Education team and other departments/teams are situated) itself is a global inventory of cultural diversity as opposite me sits a Child Protection colleague who is from the Philippines, behind her is a colleague from Germany, and behind her a colleague from Belgium. Beside her is a colleague from China, a colleague from Singapore, a colleague from Italy, from Thailand, from India, from Kenya, from France, from US, and so on. In such a limited space, there’s already a complex and ubiquitous network of knowledge, languages, beliefs, experiences and cultural expressions.

     Open concept office workspace at UNICEF EAPRO office (pictured: part of 5^th floor)

At the UNICEF Regional office in Bangkok, individuals from all over the world come together in this one diverse office in one of the most multicultural cities and successfully work on improving children’s lives in the East Asia and Pacific region. Bangkok, due to its cultural diversity, has placed itself on the map as a rapidly growing city which caters to the needs of its many diverse residents.

A Canadian, a Thai, a Japanese and others walked into a Mexican restaurant and it was like any other day in multi-cultural Bangkok.