As we can see today, there are tons of issues in Cambodia such; a lack of understanding about healthy living, inaccessibility to computer labs and know nothing about the change in their environment, but no one seems to care about those problems. However, in Liger we care about every problem in Cambodia and try to find solutions to solve those problems to make Cambodia a better place. As one of the change agents in Cambodia, I am so glad to be apart of these amazing exploration based-learning projects such as; Preventative Health, Geology of Cambodia and Raspberry Pi which already helped to solve the problems that mentioned earlier.
Apparently, Cambodia today is facing with a big issue about healthy living especially with the people who lived in rural areas or people who lived on islands. One of my favorite explorations this year was Preventative Health which we have a goal of helping the people on the island of Koh Rong to have better lives. For us to be able to solve this big problem, we collaborated with Song Saa Foundation to bring a play to the students there. In this play, we talked about healthy diet, how to avoid from getting diabetes and how to brush the teeth in the correct ways. After the play, we played games that connected to the play with the students so they won’t forget the information that we told them. Moreover, we believed that those students will spread what they have learned from us to their communities with their powerful voices which will change people’s perspective. As we collaborated with Song Saa Foundation, we get an incredible opportunity to snorkel at their private coral reef site, scuba diving and exploring bioluminescent in the middle of the sea at night. This exploration had given me a lot of new opportunities that I never had before in my entire life such as; snorkeling, scuba diving, explored and learned about bioluminescent and visiting the island.
Most of Cambodian would not think of how much their country had changed over times because of the environment that they are living in, has never changed at all. This is a big reason why Liger created this exploration called, Geology of Cambodia which I was also of the members. The goal of this exploration is to travel around Cambodia and learn about the environment in each place, like how does each place form and how can it get there. After we gathered all the information about each place, we started to share those throughout social media such as Facebook group and our own website. Our team not only shared information about each place that we visited but we also shared what have we learned in class time. So far, our team had shared a lot of characteristics of the rocks that we had found in different places such as quartzite, rhyolite and how does those rocks from. For the few week of this exploration, it was quite hard for me because all the information and what I have learned are all new to me, however, I really enjoy it. When we were on trips, I get to see many types of landscapes and I really enjoy to figure out how are those things happened and why does it look the way it is.
Technology is still one of the big problems in Cambodia. Nowadays, Cambodians can access more to technology by having smartphones and a few computer labs nearby their houses. However, as we can see, they mostly use it for social media such as Facebook, Instagram or Youtube. For the government schools that have their own technology classes, they only use it for typing courses not other courses like 3D Design. To solve this issue, our team called Solar Pi has an idea to install a solar-powered computer lab in public school and we will have our curriculum. Our curriculum mainly focus on 3D Design, where we have FreeCAD as our main program for teaching. We think 3D Design is a great idea to bring to the public school because as I mentioned earlier, most of the computer lab is only using for typing classes, not something else. Also, 3D Design can improve the student’s creative skills because it allows the students create whatever they want in 3D views like houses, building or something simpler than that such as desk and chair. We will also include other educational programs such as Enemy, where the students can learn English. Moreover, this exploration will continue until next year of school.
In conclusion, based on what I have done this year of school, I had helped to solve a lot of issues that Cambodia is facing right now. Even though I have been in a lot of explorations that help to change Cambodia but those changes are only a small part of the big change. However, I really enjoy doing those projects to get new experiences, getting to know new people and improve my skills a lot. In addition, I hope I can be on bigger projects in the future and make a bigger change for Cambodia to become a better country.