Date: June 11, 2017
Name: Saosuo Visal
Changing Cambodia 2016-2017
Cambodia my own soul, this nationality is really developing we started from nothing to have something, we started from the end of Pol Pot regime where everything was diminished to now where infractures, religion, economic, education are extremely developing. In other words, since we are the developing this defines that multitude of sections is really needed to change. In addition, a Khmer idiom that stated, “តក់ៗ ពេញបំពុង” this means to change something big, we need to do step by step. Personally, this 2016-2017 year of the Liger Leadership Academic was a speeded year and speeded change to my country. As some examples, Iron Deficiency, Robotics, and Waste Management Exploration.
Iron is one of the main molecule that our body needs to keep us healthy, a lot of Cambodian have a lack of iron especially women since they lose a lot of blood. In our Iron Deficiency Exploration, we spended seven weeks on doing research, planning, communicating with the Lucky Fish and traveling different places to investigate various ways that people here get their iron, and also we collaborated with the Lucky Iron Fish to bring iron into humans body. We did research such as, but not limited to finding what type of vegetable that contains a lot of iron, and how to use the Lucky iron fish. Well, you might wonder what is Lucky Iron Fish? For this whole Exploration, we work with the Lucky Iron Fish company to distribute the iron fish that can be used to put into the food and it will releases the iron out of the fish, so we can ingest those iron, that is why it an iron that looks like a fish. In addition, if you don’t have iron in your red blood cell (RBC) you’ll get tired and dizzy, this means, you can’t do things well since the body is sick and how can our brain focus on the works. To dot connect this, we gave this fish to those family that was in the rural regions at Siem Reap to have more iron in their body. They were poor and definitely can’t afford to buy food that contains a lot of iron like beef, cabbages and morning glory. By giving this Lucky Iron Fish to those families, they would spend less money on food, but still get a lot of iron like other food. In this Exploration, we distributed about 200 fish to different regions and families at Siem Reap and about ¼ of the people were kids and teenagers. This clearly demonstrates that our team did a phenomenal job on helping people to be more active in their life, their families economic and their study. In conclusion, this Exploration did help the physical strength of Cambodia, people become more active, students have a better learning, the family spends less money on food, and lastly, Cambodia will have a stronger engine that will drive this country.
“Ze Zee,” the sound of the robot, the second round of the Exploration in year five and it was the busiest Exploration ever. At this time Cambodian famosity gets larger and larger since our team (Botjisu) participated in the competition VEX robotic at the Taipei American School, Taiwan. Botjisu name of the robot that created by the Liger students and it made out of metals and using real programming code. In this Exploration, the main focus was to create a VEX robot that is ready to participate in the VEX robotics competition internationally. Personally, we go a really strong and working hard team, as an example, at the last day that we will go to Taiwan we spend 24 hours working on the robot without sleeping and at the morning to went to Taiwan. We brought famosity to Cambodia because, we were the first robot team from Cambodia that participated in the VEX robotics competition and won the Judge award compares to other teams from different regions like Japan, China, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore etc. This clearly shows, we try hard to work on this robots and it did give us what our hard work gave to it. Most of the people that were participated in that event were very proud of us since it was their first time that saw Cambodia team. In addition, we did not win the competition and there were few reasons behind it, the first one was our implements were every scarcity, plus the lack of experience in the robot. Moreover, we did inspire other adults and other young Cambodia to motivate that even though we were young, but we still can make it. Our team had participated in events like STEM festival and Maker Faire to share more about our robot and make them feel competitive with us. These are what we did to our country and our citizens to introduce them to more advanced technologies so at the time we grow up most of the people in this wonderful country will have more comprehension of technologies.
This is the fourth Exploration of Liger year and it was Waste Management Exploration, in this Exploration, the goal was to save the environments and to turn our idea into a business. Moreover, we were working with an organization (the CAKE project) at the Arikasak commune to improve their pilot project and turn that into a better and successful business. Since their money was keep getting out, so what we trying to do is to bring some money back to make it a negative feedback loop in their system. Our team spent our Saturday with the CAKE team to survey the villagers, are they able to afford some of their money to pay for trash collecting service. After the survey, we got 130 responses in total, and after we were collecting the data we wrote a proposal to give to the CAKE project. In this case, we feel that our Exploration helps to stabilize the idea of the people who have the heart to save the environment. Also in this Exploration, we went to Battambang province one of the cleanest city in Cambodia to explore more about the strategy of creating a compost from organic waste that originated from the market. We collaborated with the Comped startup, what they did was they went to the market and collected the organic waste that was rotten and useless to the sellers and the buyers then turns those into compost. Not only that, there was a Comped school that is located in the landfill region, more than this, the kids that were learning in this school don’t have enough books to read since it is really remote from other. Our team feels that we really want to help them and share the knowledge, so we went to that school for a half of the day to do workshop; did give them the Economy of Cambodia book and the Cambodian wildlife book. In these two scenarios we feel that we did change Cambodia by trying to find a sustainable solution for the project that trying the clean up Cambodian environment; provided a small education to a really really remote school by giving them two of our Liger books.
As a whole, this speedy year was the medium year for me because I did help to change my own country and my own people. In any condition, that wonderful year 2015-2016, Cambodia did change few things from me like; making people more active, giving a healthy life to people, finding a sustainable balance to the project that were trying to change Cambodia, giving books to a really remote region like the landfill at the Battambong, bring famousity to Cambodia by participated in the VEX robotics competition and lastly inspire people to have more competitive in technologies. In any consequences, my people live with better conditions.