I had gone on a trip for the Khmer Rouge project. Reading through articles and watch the videos was not enough to explain the truth of the history. So we had a trip to Siem Reap and Oddar Meanchey to interview the victims and the soldiers who worked for the Angkar. I went to the museum at Siem Reap that founded by one of the solider from the Angkar. I saw a lot of weapons, the weapon that caused the war and destroyed my country. So the guy who was a soldier was our tour guy, he guided us to Oddar Meanchey, the place where people buried Pol Pot (Saloth Sar) and Ta Mok. We interview a lot of victims there who has experienced the Khmer Rouge regime, I can imagine what was like to be a victim at that time. So after Ta Mok past away after we discovered the place the house turned into a museum, it was a huge house surrounded by the mood. It was a great experience to hear different perspectives from the soldiers and victims who experienced the regime, it even better for my understanding of Khmer Rouge after the trip.
TED Talk
Go toward my passion, make the change that needed to fix and applied my science knowledge to the world. I love science, I feel passionate about science, I cared about the effect of air pollution on our atmosphere and it’s finally time to change our habit to protect the planet and our next generation. As I already mentioned that I love science and public speaking so this year I was interested with TED Talk. 14 minutes of public speaking in front of a few hundred people were difficult, especially, it was my first time so I get a bit nervous at the first time. But this even taught me to calm down when I speak and one of my favorite part of the event was to engage with the audience, asking questions and dominate the whole theater.
“Be your own life and be responsible for your own work. Your dream will become true and this world will have no more troubles with air pollution if we take responsibility. “
Khmer Rouge
Khmer Rouge was a big part of Cambodian history, the regime happened for 3 years 8 months and 20 days. It was an unforgettable history that every single of us has to understand and learned from it. We could not do anything about it, besides, understand about our history and keep create changes in Cambodia. It was a sensitive project where we have to understand the misery that Khmer Rouge did it to our ancestors. They treated the citizen just like the animal where our ancestor worked 12 hours long from sunrise till midnight and having three spoons of liquid porridge with a small amount of nutrition. Imagine you were one of those victim how do you feel. After learning about the history of Khmer Rouge I was taken aback, I was shocked after watching the videos. Everyone was really upset, depressed about what the history that destroys the whole country. But this exploration had taught me one important lesson which understood my own history as a Cambodian citizen. Moreover, this exploration was a serious and sensitive experience so I have to feel passionate about this. Keep pushing myself, no matter what happened during the regime I have to learn about it and accept the truth. Our product after learning about the history, we created a hole to represent the place where the Angkar buried the victim, created a questions wall, print out the picture of the victim who suffered in that time, and lastly, the painting of the worker at the rice field.
Change Agent
In the exploration, we try to find the change maker that make the change to the community and the world. For our first project, we try to find the entrepreneur change maker which mean they are making money but also to the world. When we found out who we gonna reach out to we need to do some research about that person so that we feel confident to say that person is a changemaker. After we do some research we started to write the email in a formal way. It’s really challenging for me in the first time because I never reach out to someone that I never know them before. Also, they are the entrepreneurs so we have to put a lot of work to make the email catch their attention. We reach out to many kinds of people in different countries. Some people that I reach out to is difficult like Nick Woodman, he is a founder of GoPro. So I don’t that he receive my email or not because he is a busy man and really hard to reach out to. For the second project is a similar process but except we find on the social enterprise that is a changemaker. Through this exploration, I had learned a lot and it improves my learning to the next level. I had learned so many projects from the change maker around the world and in Cambodia. Our major intention of reaching out to the change maker is to improve our network skill but also we ask the permission to record the video. We use the video to distribute to other young change maker and inspired more people to make the change in their community especially Cambodia. We had put it on our own blog but we also have our own Youtube channel that has all of the interviews.
Blog:http://changeagents.ligercambodiablog.org
Youtube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsnZFjtVgq-ex7G_xCD5l5A