To be able to change your country, you have to learn a lot more about your country itself. I was born in Cambodia, but doesn’t mean that I know all of the information about Cambodia. There are a lot of thing that I have to learn before I can change my country. One of the thing that you really have to know a lot about your country is the language and the culture. We’ve been learning about the language and culture about Cambodia for the past few months and after knowing a pretty good amount of them.
We decided to created an event called “Khmer Literature Event” which was a full day event that contain different presentation at different booth that related to culture and language in Cambodia and all of those presentation was fully done in Khmer. This is one of the small change that we had made to our country because when we created this event it means we are one of the person out there that wanted to bring back our culture because it was gone since the Khmer Rouge era. We also got to shared what we learnt to other people who are not in our school which was a really great opportunity for us to tell people what are we trying to help bring back for our country and let them help us by do the same or similar thing that we are doing.
Learning about everything is really important, but if we didn’t get a chance to shared it to other people then what is the point of learning something that related to your country to make change. Sharing is one of the most difficult part to do even though you learned a lot of different and major thing because there are not a lot of people out there that have the same mind set like us that we want to change our country, but we had came up with an idea to try to share something in a fun way so people can easily get the message that we are trying to share quicker.
“Liger Community Travelling Theater” is project that aim to bring a real live performance or entertainment to the people who live in the rural area. In those entertainment we don’t focus on Religious or Political, but we do focus on change. We did have a play that were talking about the real issues that happen right now in Cambodia Society. So, we was trying to come with idea how can we delivery the messages not a really serious, but more like a fun way then we decided to do it through travelling Theater. We did delivered the message to other people out there in Cambodia with a really fun and interesting way and it seems like people really like how it turns out since we also have other performances along with the play itself.
There are a lot of country in the world that are developing their countries really quickly and I believe one of those country is Cambodia. I missed a lot of really important events of my country because of the development and all of the documentary that has been made has disappeared. Imagine if all of those documentaries still exist until now how happy would I want to see how far my community has grown. I believe everybody want to see who has change their country/community along the way until they was born. Not everybody can do documentary easily if you don’t have all of the resources, but since we have the resources so we took this opportunity to create other amazing project.
“Community Documentary” basically focusing on making documentary for four villages in Kampong Speu Province which are Chrok Porpoul, Trapang Leap, Prey Ansae, and Srey Sampong Village. In this project is a collaboration between Liger Students and the World Renew Students. We went to those four villages that stated above and we did interview a lot of people who live in those villages. After we took all of those information to make video, a photo album book, website, and podcast. After we finished all of those stuff, we went back to those villages and share what we’ve been working on after collected all of the data. The villagers was so happy to see us go back and they were so happy that they got to hear their voices in the podcast and see there faces in the photo album. We hope to deliver all of the information that we’ve been documenting to the next generation because we don’t know what going happen in the village maybe in the next 10 years it will be so develop and then the next generation can look through our documenting and can see how has their villages have grown.
If you were to live in the coastal area and when we made the documentary for you, but all of you before and after is all about the ocean pollution would you be happy about your community? For me I wouldn’t want see my community being polluted. Sometimes the visitors don’t really what really happen toward the ocean because sometimes the community only clean the beach area where the visitors like to visit, but when you ride the boat to the middle of the ocean you will see some of the plastic bag that float on the water and the water is changing its color to greenish.
“Marine Theater” has made its way to become a part to create change toward that problem. We learned a lot about the marine life and all of the ecosystem services and how we create different kind of threats toward the ocean. We were focusing on four different problem that we, human give the impact to the ocean such as coastal development, illegal fishing, coral bleaching, and pollution. We’ve been deep down into all of those problem and then we decided to pick one of them to create a play that we are going to show the people who live around the coastal area. We decided to pick pollution because we know that it is one of the really big problem that happens in Cambodia everywhere not just the ocean. We decided to pick this problem not the illegal fishing because fishing is one of the main job that Cambodian do and sometimes they didn’t do the illegal fishing at first, but because of other illegal fisher, they can’t catch any fish anymore that might be the case why they changed from the tradition fishing method to illegal fishing and since it is affect the fishing community livelihood so it is a really hard problem to solve because they might think that if they change to do traditional fishing method like before they won’t be able to catch a lot of fish anymore.
To be able to change any problems isn’t a really easy thing to do. You need to have a lot of education, but not all of Cambodian got a chance to have the education as much as I do. STEM is really important because it is just a four letter words that nearly include every important subjects that you need to learn. We was thinking of creating a project that related to STEM so we can took that opportunity to be able to share our knowledge to other children who didn’t get a chance to receive all of those education, but it turns out that most of the project that related to STEM isn’t a really easy thing to do here in Cambodia because most of the products are really expensive and it is really hard for the rural kid to support. It seems like most of the engineering project that our school want to deliver to Cambodia wasn’t a really easy way to do because some of the supplies that we need to make a product is not a Cambodia friendly.
We came up with a project call “STEMginnering” that we can deliver STEM & Engineering to Cambodian by using Cambodia product. We decided to create this project because we really want to share what we know about STEM and Engineering to government school. We was struggling to come up with idea what we want to create that we be able to design by ourselves and importantly it should be Cambodia friendly. My team and I, we came up with a product call Shooter (it sounds dangerous and in real life it is also dangerous, but we tell the students not to shoot at each other). We went to two different government school and it was a really amazing experience to spend time with the student there because it seems like they are so excited for our project.
This is just me trying to put how many project that I’ve involved has made a small change toward my country, but if we take a look and learn more deeply about all of those project, it is more than I can do if everybody took a part in one of those project and help each other make a small change. If all of us collaborate with each other to make a small change then together we can make a big change.
