It's come around so quickly but in just over a week on the 28th September I will be flying to Malaysia again. I will never forget my first presentation about sex education in 2010 to a group of teachers at BES Asia. You could hear a pin drop in the auditorium, I had been forewarned that it would probably be more like a lecture than a discussion as sex and relationships are still very much taboo when speaking about young people.

The week before I arrived there had been an article about the opening of Kuala Lumpur's first  baby hatch http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-11214652 . I had been shocked to learn that when young women become pregnant they often conceal their pregnancy. They don't access ante-natal care and often deliver their babies alone, sometimes in public toilets. Something that Malaysians called "baby dumping" was often the only way a young woman could deal with her unplanned pregnancy in secret. I was told of stories of babies left in carrier bags and sometimes not being found alive. The fear of anybody finding out that a young woman had had sex and had become pregnant was so great that young women were driven to desperate measures and risked their own lives to conceal it. The baby hatch was seen as one solution to this very complex problem - the baby could be given attention and hopefully placed for adoption. However the young woman who had had no ante-natal care and no care during or after the delivery could not be followed up.

How easy it would have been if sex education had informed young women about contraception and about the importance of looking after themselves during pregnancy and after delivery. What i was experiencing here          was culture shock. Nothing was ever going to be that simple.

I found in the auditorium that I had everyone's attention and that I could say all of these things about honesty, as the government behind the baby hatch had stated that sex education needed to be reviewed. Never the less I could see that attitudes of a lifetime would not be changed over night.

And now I find that I have been invited to speak again and to my horror I have noticed another deep rooted issue http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/14/malaysia-seminars-spot-gay-children?intcmp=239 about attitudes to same sex relationships http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/14/malaysia-schoolchildren-gay that I will need to consider carefully while I am planning my sessions. In no way do I want to offend my audience. I am privileged to have been invited. But the cultural differences are so great that i know this is going to present me with a huge challenge as it's so clearly in conflict with my own beliefs and values.