To answer the questions from my last post: Phnom Penh was a great place to recover from jetlag, with its blossoming cafe culture. There were no women speakers at the plenary sessions of the conference; however this was not for want of trying on the part of the conference organisers, and there were several female speakers in the parallel themed sessions. Finally, it seems the world contains far more Buddhist universities than you’d expect! They’re mostly in Asia, but there’s also one in Boulder, Colorado - where as it happens, my cousin works.

It’s exactly a year since my last invitation to the East, when I was providing consultancy to the Ministry of Education of the Royal Government of Bhutan. You can hear all about this in my lecture Bhutan Revisited. I’m very fortunate to be offered such interesting travels, given that my everyday life is pretty simple. I live with six friends in a Buddhist women’s community in Salford. Most of them are ordained, like me, and so are my colleagues at work.

This is the quiet time of my year as a travel lecturer; however, my day job as Munisha, education officer at The Clear Vision Trust, is providing plenty of other opportunities for public speaking: at a conference in June marking the first 100 years of Buddhism in Britain I gave a talk about Buddhism and Young People in Britain. As a result I now have an invitation to speak on using video to teaching young people about Buddhist ethics, at another conference, in September, in Bangkok, run by the International Association of Buddhist Universities.

Will I be the sole woman speaker? Will it be great fun to go there via my half-sister’s house in Phnom Penh and visit her sweet daughters? And just how many Buddhist universities could there be in this world? Come back and find out.