Posts

Posted on

River of Victory Poem

Her brother is a gangster

What kind of animal sells his own sister?

The fear of violence gets in her way

The struggle she has, she can’t even say

What is important, is what is find beneath

But she living in a place that is not healthy to breath

Beep Beep Beep,  the horn puts her in a good mood  

The trash truck provides hope that she can find food

Trash gives her hope

She lives in struggle, fear and lost a world we do not know

To us, trash is trash, but to her, gold.

Trash are the diamond glint on snow

They breath the poison wind  blow.

They woke up in the morning hush

They collect the trash in a rush.

The sound on the hungry son cry

They try to work, they try in collect, they try their best, so they won’t die.

 

 

 

Posted on

Fashion in Cambodia

Fast-fashion is a problem all over the world but people haven’t thought of this problem. This also a problem in Cambodia where we have more than 1500 garment factories in Cambodia and employed almost 1 million workers.

 

As a solution of fast-fashion, we had create an exploration to up cycle clothes and redesign clothes and our teacher had create a business call Junxtapoze. In this exploration we had create a challenges to design and up cycle clothes for the customer. Also we had hire 3 tailors in the community around Liger. We help the tailor to earn more income to support their family economy. We had provide them the price more than the market price for different design to encourage them to make more for us.  In Junxtapoze we also do a Junx consultation-where people can tell what kind do they love about clothes and their personality than we will design clothes for them based on their personality.

 

We hope that people around the world understand about fast fashion and understand how it impact to the environment and labor. We encourage you to think about the clothes that you have, What do you do with it? Where it goes? How can you recycle it? And lastly think before you consume more.  

 

In the project we also making a challenges that we have to design that we need to make from scratch and small pieces of fabric into art for any creative design.

We also compete with different schools and NGOs on this challenges!

Posted on

Sport Journey in Cambodia

Back in my hometown Kampong Speu, my family live in a small village called Trav. There is nothing much happening in the village rather then villagers going to the rice farm. Once I was 6 year old my mom force me to go to school about 2 km away from our house. She brought me to school for the 1st week of school then I ride my own bicycle by myself. Whenever my mom took me to school she always told me to focus on classes work not playing physical games with my male classmate. With the confusing expression on my face, she refused my face and turn to my teacher and told him to take care of me. I can see the frightening looked on her face. Everyday I refused what my mom said and play physical sports with my male class mats. I told them to hide this with my parents so they won’t punish me.   

As a young teenage girls living at the government school in rural Kampong Speu who never got a chances to play any proper sport, and all I did was kicking the ball with no strategies and just running around. As i got older the boys started to refuse me playing football with them. Whenever I asked then to play football and they responded with an aggressive NO! I was confused and upset when they refused my favor. Nevertheless their words can stop me playing sports. From that moment I reflected to myself and committed to work hard and one day to prove that they are wrong.   

 

In 2012, I got an amazing opportunity to come and learn at an amazing school called Liger Leadership Academy. I said to myself, this is a great opportunities to prove my old friends was wrong. I had join any sports activities that given from the coaches. First sports that I had join was Football. I was try tremendously in focusing on sports and also my academic. Furthermore I had join basketball, swimming and frisbee. With a hard work in physical sports, finally i got an opportunities to compete in  Manila Spirit for Cambodian ultimate team. Latter on, I went to compete more tournament oversea and nationally. One of the competition called, “Grizzly Opening,” this competition was held in Malaysia and this is one of the best competition because we play in women’s division.

 

Girl doing sports is not a culture for females in Cambodia.  They usually staying under the shade or “jol m’lup”. This is a culture that Cambodian girls usually do: protect their skin from the sun, learn how to cook, how to be a wife and learn how to be a proper girl. This are the culture that most of Cambodian are following. Now, 2019 people are educated enough so they let their daughter playing a lot of sport also doing physical activities.

 

My mom, Sokha said that,“ Before I would not allow both of my daughter playing sports because they might get hurt also might forget to do school work.”  My mom really want me to focus on school more than everything else. She also said that school is very important for my future also my family future. Nowadays, our family is one of the poorest family in the village so she think that the only thing we could be better is to get a good education. But if I really appreciate in doing sports activities, I got the best support from her and my entire family. My mom is the biggest supporter I ever had. She also stated that, “ In her childhood, she never have a chance to get what she want and to do what she love. So, she want her daughters to got the chance that they want also achieve their dream.” Having the  tremendous support from my parent pushes me to work extremely hard to reach my dreams.

 

A Cambodian collage student also said that, “In the future he will allow his daughter to play sport because it is healthy and also make her brave both physical and metal. I will support her if she needed!” It’s really rare for a young Cambodian to say and encourage girls (daughter) doing physical activities. The country is developing people also develop their perspective on gender. Girls can do more than staying at home and to be a wife. All they need is an encouragement.  

 

Women are smarter than people are round think about them think. Each and every women around the world have their own potential and their own strength.  They need an encouragement and chances. Since i got and opportunities to play sports i hope that girls around the world has this opportunities too. Since Cambodia develop citizen also develop their  though and get more influence from an outside world.

 

To all girls out there, show your potential, strength and ability to work hard or even harder then some boys!

 

Posted on

Solubility Experiment

Often when people are sick they will take as many drug as they want to relieve their symptoms, but they never know the side effect of taking too much drug. So it is important to know the characteristic of the drug and the amount that we should take.

 

In our chemistry class, we investigated the solubility and acidity of over-the-counter medicine: aspirin, Tylenol, Alka-seltzer, and tums—in different solvents.

A drug has to be soluble in order for the body tissues to easily absorb it. Our body should be able to absorb the medication easily for it to be effective. In addition, when drugs are not soluble, it is possible that there’s a residue of that drug in our body, causing adverse effects to our body. I think that is why we usually take medication along with water or any liquid and also liquid medicine since more of those drugs are soluble with that solvent.

 

Posted on

Flame Lab

Every element on this earth are made out of atoms!

We all know that the best way to start a chemistry course is by learning about atoms structure and the element in the periodic table. In my chemistry class this round we did this one cool lab called the Flame Test, in the purpose of understanding how the electron (s) of an element reacts to heat.

We measured the result of the electron reaction through observing the color of the element when it’s in contact with flame. The reason that we see the colors is that of the energy that emitted by each electron when they excited corresponding to a wavelength of a the light.

One of the challenges that my team faced was that some pieces of the element dropped onto the bunsen burner tip so we had to make sure that it clean at all cost when we tested another element. Another challenge that we have is to observe the right color and note it down the right color. Furthermore, when we tested same element such as potassium but, we didn’t see the color change of the flame, so we just assume that the electrons gave out orange, which it isn’t accurate at all. Lastly, we have a lot of fun during this class and in the lab particular.

Posted on

Journeys of Change

One of our exploration is call Bike Business Exploration, where we are developing a bike business. On the first week of our exploration we went to Batttambang to visited a bike tour business call “Soksabike”. We went there for a 4 days trip and having 2 bikes tours from them.  Also learning how do their business work and how do they developed their work. It is really great start of our exploration by experiencing with the other bike tour in the countryside. So we come back to Phnom Penh and develop our rough. We had name our bike your company call “Journeys of Change”. We had found an interesting rough also dividing the stop. We had decided that we will have 10 stops and each stop having difference stories that connecting Cambodia in the past and future. The purpose of business is to creating a business where we want to share what have happen to Cambodian in the past and future to the tourists.

In Journey of Change business that have new position this year. I had change from a business manager to guide manager. So I need to prepare a training to the new tour guide. There are 14 new guides and most of them are new to the business so i need to train them to become a professional tour guide before they tour our clients.

 

In this business i also submits 2 of the picture that i took to compete in a competition call GoGreen. I had won to the top 15 best photos and they hung my photo at the event in Plantation hotel. I joined the event and there are a lot of photo connected to environmental conscious business. I met a lot of incredible people and one of them is the hotel manager and he invited us for a breakfast at his hotel and talk more about our business in the next morning.  

Also we have the new strategies for the business from last school year. We had develop our new website and new marketing strategies.

 

This past few weeks the Liger Academy’s students had took our tour and it was a fabulous experience for the new guide they can share what they have learn and practice their skill.  

 

Posted on

Solar Pi Exploration

The pilot project aim is to build two Raspberry Pi computer labs into two government schools, one of the schools will be solar-powered and the other one will use electricity.

 

We are collaborating with the Ministry of Education, Cambodian English learning startup Edemy, and two government schools in Cambodia. These schools are Toul Prasat Sen Sok and Chuos Lower secondary school. An advantage of this is that we can compare the results between the different power sources and quality of education, to show our partners that the project could work with two different sources with ease. So this exploration was build since last year and now we are continuing on the computer labs that we had implement.

 

After implementation, our team decided to visit the Chous school once again before they would resume in November 2018. We went over the curriculum schedule, the teacher’s teaching strategy, and the school’s budgeting for maintenance. We also made some observations and noticed that there were some broken mice and keyboards as well as growing fungi on the Pi cases. Furthermore, our team encountered some challenges related to the screens, video player for FreeCAD tutorials, and the cables that were invaded by rats. Due to all of these issues, we started to consider having plastic bags to cover all equipment, setting up a cleaning schedule, buying mouse traps, and purchasing mousepads.

Our team had arranged a visit to the Toul Prasat Sen Sok school on September 18th in order to make updates and prepare for the start of the next school year in November. We checked to see if there were any technical problems or broken equipment to replace during the observation. In summation, there were four missing headphones and one of the desktops keeps turning off every 10 minutes. We were also surprised to see lots of dust in the room which sooner or later would impact our technical devices. By the end of our visit, we got to talk with the school director. The school director suggested us to open up this opportunity to other students who are interested in learning English and computer. He thought that since we were having some problems with student attendance and since the students did very poorly on their grade 9 official test, it would make more sense to give this opportunity to those who value it more. If we’re going to use this idea, additional pre-tests will be required at the beginning of next school year.

Posted on

Slope from two points.

If you are given to find slope above what should you do? 

Well let me teach you, to find slope in graph you need to find the change in Y over the change in X or rise/run.   

So we had given the first plot is (-9,-6) and second is (3,-9) 

So first we find the change in Y and the change in X. 

Change in Y = Y1 – Y2 

Change in X = X 1 – X 2 

We have and equation the find the difference, So plug the number that was given in to the equation above. 

We have  (-9,-6) and (3,-9)  

The change in Y = -6 -(-9) 

                                Y  = 3 

The change in X = -9 – 3 

                               X = -12 

So then we get -3/12 which is simplify to -1/4. 

 

 

Posted on

How I change Cambodia

It has been six years already since I left home for Liger Leadership Academy, my second home.  We follow project-based curriculum; students can do research in class and explore difference societies to further their knowledge and gain experience. Project-based learning has helped me develop as a future leader in many different areas: sports, Solar Pi, and Journeys of Change.

 

Cambodian elders’ perspective is “sports is not for women,” but I don’t think that it is a good idea. Since I came to learn at Liger Leadership Academy, I got opportunities to participate in different sports: swimming, basketball, football and ultimate frisbee. By evolving in sports, I received a lot of opportunities travel to other countries to compete.  When I came back, I helped develop a workshop for the students in Cam-kids, Kampong Speu province. Being an instructor helped me give my opinion toward sports and changed the elders’ perspective in women playing sports. Teaching them made me stronger in public speaking and also a stronger leader.

In the government school, students are having lack knowledge toward technology and having lack of technology resources. Liger got requested by the ministry to implement technology labs and English curriculum into two schools. In this project, I am working on making video tutorials about FreeCAD. By working on this project, I help improve Cambodia education, inspire more students into the technology sector, also make them think about the future. Making video tutorials I have to speak really clear so that students can understand and you need to be a great leader to inspire people.   

 

Talking about a leader, I am one of the business managers of Journeys of Change. Journeys of Change is a cultural bike tour experience that had created by 13 Liger Leadership Academy students. This business made to help spread the culture of Cambodia to tourists and expats of Phnom Penh also to find funds to support the student’s future education. The students developed the rout, scripts, marketing idea, and business plan.  I am one of the members of JOC that help develop the marketing strategies also a qualified tour guide. To be a tour guide you need to be flexible, responsible, also being a leader that lead the tourists to the insight of Cambodia. Now I employed by Journeys of Change as a business manager which render me more opportunity to be a leader. By join Journeys of Change, I can contribute some changes to my country and my future education.

 As a change agent, we can’t estimate how much our actions make a circumstance to society. By these small actions can shift elder perspective to improve the power of women. If we want to be a future change agent to our country, we prerequisite small actions from now and start developing skills. I am Cambodia, and I want to see my country grow but I always ask myself, “How can I involved in that growth.” Kevin E Bowser stated, “It is never too late to be an encouraging leader,” but it not really much to my situation so, I said to myself “It is not too early to be encouraging leader.” To all the students around the world, “Don’t let someone else drag your dream because you are too young.”

       

Posted on

Khmer New Year Inspiration

In our literacy class, our facilitator told us to write something about our vocation. But this writing will be something different from the other writing is that we use the best memory from our vocation and making a story from it. H 

“Leak was raised by her grandmother in a quiet village called Treng. After her parent dies her life become so complicated but she so positive about her life. One day she went into the bathroom and cry the whole time. The bathroom spirit was so concerned about this girl when she comes to ask. She explains to the girl that she as a good spirit then she asked the girl what had happened to her. The little girl explains what had happened to her life and where she will be. It was said the here human life. To make her happy the spirit give her a special gift which is all her wish will come true but she needs to make though wish in the bathroom. After the spirit gives her the gift, her life becomes much better and she won’t forget the first moment that she met the spirit. Another power that she had is to allow the people she want to see the spirit. ”   

This writing is not perfect but I want to share what I had done.