My name is Makara, I am one of the senior coaches at Indochina Starfish Foundation (ISF). I always dreamed of being a football coach and developing football in Cambodia. I used to be the leader of my high school football team and then I was a volunteer coach. I have learned many things since I came to ISF in 2011, I got to know many other football organisations and worked closely with them, especially Coaches Across Continents (CAC). For some years, CAC has been working with ISF to teach coaching and football for social change. They also do international exchanges when coaches from different countries train each other. This month, I was selected to teach in CAC’s programme in The Philippines.

After working with CAC for a few years, in the coaching programme and doing the online degree, I was thrilled to hear that I was selected to join the programme in The Philippines.  I immediately started to prepare documents and exercises to do during the training. CAC selected someone specifically from Cambodia. The CAC programme in the Philippine is similar to Cambodia and they organise an exchange to share football skills to others football coaches.  The training is based on doing fun games to teach about social issues. In this case, the CAC programme was focused on child rights and gender equality.

The reason that I wanted to be part of the programme because I want to work closely with CAC in order to learn more about football and share it to other coaches both in Cambodia and other countries. Charlie from CAC and I provided training to 82 coaches in Tacloban and BayBay. First they learn about some of the games we developed and then they get to create games by themselves. Some Filipino volunteers helped us with the sessions.

Beside sharing and coaching them, I also learned a lot from the Filipino coaches. They taught me some English football terms and new methods to create football games about social issues like HIV. One more thing, joining this programme taught me about being flexible and communication skills with foreigners. I also learned a lot more about football for social change.

It was the first time for me to travel abroad and I really like The Philippines: the green environment, nice food and very friendly people. Even though some things (like flying for the first time) were a bit challenging, I would like to work with CAC team in the future to do more training abroad. After coming back, I talked to our coaches about what I learned in The Philippines and what skills they need to also do an international exchange. On the top of that, I will talk to our Football Programme Manager to arrange a training course that I have done in The Philippines to share to other coaches.  I hope other coaches will get opportunity like me to work with CAC staff and exchange with others coaches.