Being a fourteen Cambodian girl, that got the scholarship in a marvelous school which is Liger Leadership academy seems as a fascinating opportunity for me. I got the privilege to out of my comfort zone and look to the outside environment of my own society. I am very honor to be born in this place, a place with amazing culture. In addition, by studying at Liger I got to make and generate many many positive impact and changes in my own country through our school based-learning projects. Through the projects, my mind has open and started to think deeply through the areas of each project. In addition, it also create change the people of the ways they look and think of their surroundings, the actions that they are doing every day in their daily life, and their reflection of their environment and country. Majority of those projects had the field trip to the provinces around Cambodia. For some of those, we either had performance or educational presentation to the community. While a few of those, we had the trip to conduct our data, or to o the research method. My projects that are a part of Cambodia are Community Documentary, Traveling Theater, Ecotourism and Robotic.
Community Documentary was the exploration which we document information in the rural community. I was being a part of helping and keeping important information to get the next generation to know the rural community in my country. Through those documentary, We created our final products for the community such as creating blog, photo book, podcast and video. In addition, during the journey of the documentary we trained some of the community youth from the community, too. We gave such an awesome opportunity to them to hold the camera in their first time and produce stunning picture and video. Moreover, after our documents were finalized we went to the community to share our products and do the presentation of what we have done to the villagers. Especially, there were many people come to our presentation and they were very impressed of our achievements.
Traveling Theater was a theater exploration where we travel from place to place to perform. Our goal for this exploration was to showcase performances, educational films and play to the rural communities and schools in the provinces around Cambodia by contributed opportunity to get awareness of their outside environment while they are having entertain. Before going on trip, Our team had prepared on setting up the stage depending on the situation of place we are going. We Also learned how to set up the electricity and the speaker. I would say that This was one of my project that could change Cambodian’s mindset of their surroundings. It changed of how people look at things and treat things in positivity. Especially, our target audiences which were students and villagers were really really inspire and impress of what we were doing while they were having fun. I am really proud of myself and my team of being brave of performed such an in touch plays to all the audience.
Ecotourism was an exploration which we are planning to create a Community-based ecotourism site in a Kuy Indigenous community in Preah Vihear Province, Cambodia. This year, I spent almost 14 weeks of working on this project. For the first 7 weeks, in order to create this site we needed to do the research on marketing of the project. In particular, our team spreaded the journey of interview the tourists of their interesting toward our site. We also went to the community to do our feasibility study to whether know if the place potential enough for Community-based ecotourism. I hope this project will actually happen one day, because it give such huge impacts on the community. It creates job for local people, by being a tour guide, giving accommodation or homestay to people, ability to show their skills or other. Therefore, it give the advantages to the natural resources, and environment as well. Before, most the villagers in the community are cutting down trees to sell or make coal, hunting for animals… But if the project happen, all of those activities will not going to happen again.
Robotics was also a project where I and the other three students from the Liger Leadership Academy, preparing for the 2019 Guangxi Adolescent Robot Competition and the ASEAN National Adolescent Robot Invitational Tournament that head in Wuzhou, Guangxi, China. The First Lego League theme for this year is Into Orbit which is related to Space. It was such an amazing experience as a competitor in this competition. There were teams from 4 ASEAN countries including Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia and Philippine and many many teams from China. However, There was just one team from Cambodia which is NORAKBOT (my team). It was really honour of representing Cambodia in this competition. It was the way that shown “Cambodian kids also can do it”. It’s the way that introduce Cambodia and its culture to other countries in the competition. Especially, our team was honored to hold our Cambodia’s flag in this Science-Technology competition.
The four above projects are a part of my changing Cambodia. But there are a lot of projects more that aimed me the step of changing my country. Those changes are start from myself or other peoples and it doesn’t matter much because of how old you are. I believe that those small changes might make a piece of positive change in Cambodia. And I hope those small changes are very benefits to my country and help me to prepared to create greater changes in the future.