Our world is changing every day and as people in Cambodia, we also have to change to catch up with the modernization of the rest of the world to make our country better. Being a student at the Liger Leadership Academy has changed my mind to think of creating change in Cambodia. From what I have learned and what I have done in this school, I think these are the things that I change my country so far.
Technovation
To change our own country is not easy, but if you can change it little by little,
our country will develop more and more.
The Liger Leadership Academy has given an opportunity to all of the juniors girls to participate in Technovation. Technovation is one of the programs that allow girls to participate more in technology and to learn the necessary skills to become tech entrepreneurs and leaders.
I am one of the students who had the opportunity to participate in Technovation because I believe that girls should be more involved in Technology, especially coding. Girls who code, Boys who cook. We went to Phounment school every Sunday to study and learn more about coding. Before we get into coding, we have to learn how to access our app idea first. For example: learn how to identify a problem in our community and create a mobile app solution to address that problem. We also learned how to communicate the ideas and translate them into a fully launched business. We have only three months to do it and only on Sundays. For those three months, my team came up with an idea to create an app called Farmer’s Market. Farmer’s Market is an app that solves the poverty problem in Cambodia. Did you know that there are many people are farmers in Cambodia? They grow their plants by not using chemicals, but the problem is that they don’t have a market to sell their agricultural products such as vegetables and fruits. Our app will help those farmers. When farmers download our app, they can post information about their fruits or vegetables that they want to sell. When any farmers post the information, the customers and people that use our app will see and if they want to buy something, they can contact the seller by phone number. How can our app help people? Our app is like a market, where farmers can sell their product any time they want. They don’t have to go to the physical market and search for customers themselves. Some farmer’s farm can be really far from the market, so they can’t go to sell their product easily. If they use our app, they can just post it and the customers will buy their product really easy.
Poverty is one of the biggest problems in Cambodia, but our app can help them. Farmer’s Market change farmers life.
Geography Trip ( How liger students change Cambodia )
For the first day, we have been to many places that are fascinating and beautiful. One place that I really interested in the most is in Kroches province which is Koh Trong Island. There are many special things about it. People that live on that Island said, the soil is really good with a lot of nutrient for plantation to grow. The plant that most of the people grow and the most valuable is pomelo. The pomelo in Koh Trong is really different from other pomelo that doesn’t grow on Koh Trong. It is more delicious and sweater that other pomelo. We also had a chance to eat that pomelo. It tasted super delicious. I never ate that kind of delicious fruit before. After we went to Koh Trong to eat pomelo and collected the information, we went back to Kroches city. We stayed in a green guesthouse. That house is really beautiful and hygiene. When we went to the guesthouse, we didn’t take a shower and eat dinner yet, so we have to do it. After we took a shower, we went to eat dinner in a restaurant. The foods that we ate was so delicious with a good serve. Liger students are the only eater that cleaned and prepared everything that we ate, for example: we putted of all the dishes in order, cleaned the table, took the dishes to clean, prepared and cleaned everything on the table. It shows that, Liger students are really responsible for everything that they did, sensitive and helpful to people around them. Even though we ate foods by paying money, but when we leave, we have shown a really respectful to the owner of the restaurant by saying “Thank you for the foods”. When we do those kind of things and leave by saying “Thank you for the foods”, the owner show her face expression by smiling and said “I really appreciate that”. This is Liger students. After eating, we went back to the guest house and make a discussion about the informations that we got. We worked with each other really hard, communicate with each other well and talk to each other nicely. When one of us did something wrong or make someone felt bad, we always talk to them and try to find solutions. We always keep the six core values in our mind in everytime we went outside or somewhere else. Those six core values are Integrity, ingenuity, stewardship, determination, optimism and appreciation. These core values are extremely meaningful to us because it is a part of our life. For the seven days of Geography, we have done a really good job and came back with a big smiling face because we have more informations to put in the book and have been to many places that we never seen before.
Robotic (EXPLORATION) Changing Cambodia
Robotic is one of my favorite exploration. The purpose of doing the exploration is to join the first lego league competition in Singapore. The topic of this competition is about Hydrodynamic which means we are going to use our robot to do some missions about water and give a presentation about water too. In this exploration, we don’t just study about robots and presentation, but we also learn how to communicate with each other. We only have seven weeks to do all of those things, but we were able to do it. During our exploration class, we found out that water is one of the problems in Cambodia and that there are two types of water that can affect people. One is the Contaminated water and the other is Arsenic. There are two teams of this exploration. I was part of one of the teams that was working on the Contaminated water. We see that Contaminated water comes from humans and factories. People throw their trash into water without thinking deep of how it will affect marine life and their life. Some people may see trash on the water and rather than find ways to remove the trash from the water, they would throw more trash in instead. They think that “there is only a little bit of trash in the water, so if I throw in one more trash, it will not make a difference”. Everything start from one. If people keep saying that, it will become a habit soon and the country will never further develop. There are trash bins where people can throw their trash in; don’t just throw trash in anywhere that you want because it can affect yourself too. Water is one of the many resources that humans need to survive, so if the water becomes contaminated, there won’t have be any clean water to drink. There are many kind of germs in contaminated water which can cause diseases. You can get many types of diarrheal diseases, including Cholera, and other serious illnesses such as Guinea worm disease, Typhoid, and Dysentery. All of those diseases are really dangerous and they cause 3.4 million deaths each year. So, if you want to stay alive, you shouldn’t throw your trash to water. Not only does throwing a trash can affect your life, but the wastes from the factory also make your water become contaminated, too. The wastes contain many bacterias that are dangerous. When you drink it, you can get diarrhea really easily. I hope that all of the factories around the world will find another way of keeping their wastes rather than release it to water since it can affect people life. Contaminated water also affects the marine life. Marine is a part of our life. Why? Because they provide important ecosystem services such as the provision of food, medicines, and livelihoods. They also support tourism and recreational activities around the world. Marine life can change our country too, so you shouldn’t throw the trash to water or release the wastes to water. Clean water is the best natural remedy that helps people. These are all of the pieces of information that we got to present to the judges in Singapore. After the presentation, judges said, “We are proud of your presentation on how to solve the problems and present with your confidence ”. We were really excited when we heard those words from those judges mouths. We have a really confident in our team though sadly, we didn’t win, we said “Win is not what we want, but what we want is our communication and to experience and we will win later ” One special thing about our robotic team is that we are the only Cambodian team to went to represent about Hydrodynamics in Cambodia.