Exploration – Samady

January 12, 2017October 30, 2017

Khmer Rouge Exploration (round 3)

Khmer Rouge (round 3) was one of my favourite Explorations. In this class, at first, I learned about different genocides around the world including, the Holocaust, Bosnian Genocide, Rwandan Genocide, and Armenian Genocide. I continued learning more about the overall history of Cambodia.

Cambodia has been rebuilding from the massive genocide called Khmer Rouge that killed approximately 2 million people between 1975 – 1979. Pol Pot was the leader of the Khmer Rouge and he believed all Cambodians should be equal. However, no one could have seen what he meant by that and when he started to take control over the country, things started to go wrong. During this regime, people were forced to leave their homes and families to work as slaves and soldiers in atrocious conditions. Over just a few years, Cambodians lost their family, friends, property, dignity and even identity. In 1976, a high school located in Cambodia’s capital city, Phnom Penh, was turned into a prison where the Khmer Rouge soldiers tortured the victims. It is known as Cambodian Genocide Museum or in short, S-21.

I was shocked after seeing all of the things in S-21. I saw different cells where they put the victims. It was small, some were made from bricks, and some were made from woods. I saw the black chain that stuck out of the floor, which used to be the chain that tied the victim’s leg so they couldn’t escape the prison. I still could see the blood stain that left from the torture.

Other things I could see was skulls of the people who got shot, or hit by something on the head. There were some arts painted by Vann Nath hanging on the wall to display all the torture methods he saw the soldiers did. In the museum, they also display the weapons used, and all of the victims portraits. They all looked so sad, some were man, woman, and even children. It’s insane how people could just killed all those little child, and their nation.

I hope Cambodia doesn’t go through this again. I wish more Khmer people get to come to S-21 to learn more about the genocide. Genocide is crazy to think about, it destroy everything, and brings no good to the country. At the end of the day, this genocide was a sad thing, but we all should keep moving on, and try to change this developing region in a positive way.

December 3, 2016

Waste Management Exploration

This is a business Exploration, to be honest I hate learning about business but I found it is very important for me to learn about it in able to success in life and one thing that encourage me to keep going is that it will help this community to reduce the waste that they throw, burn or bury. I learned that before we could start a business, we need to know the feasibility of it. The feasibility study are focusing on Technical, Economical/Financial, Legal, Operational, and Scheduling. Each of us in class need to explain each of the section into a report which will be our business plan. We got the information from interviewing the people around the community and researching on the internet. My reflection about the interview, was that I got to ask questions and took notes. It was fun but there are always problems happen along the way, for an example – the interviewees does not understand what the questions mean. When writing the feasibility study, I was doing okay but the complicated parts were that it was hard to communicate with the other students on the report because all of these sections are related. One of the sections that I was working on was the organizational feasibility, it was hard to predict or estimate the cost of the materials that we will need for the business, and finding the land, location, facility, labour to do the business. I hope this business will work to help reducing waste in this village and to take care of the environment.

November 13, 2016October 23, 2017

Iron DeFishiency (Iron Deficiency)

Iron Deficiency is the first Exploration I’d done in Year 5 of Liger. It is also the second best Exploration I had so far. In class we learned a lot of things, many and tons of things. In this class, we’re focusing on Anemia caused by iron deficiency. Our teacher found this organization which helped to reduce this health problem in Cambodia called Lucky Iron Fish. We worked with them to create a presentation to do a workshop at Siem Reap which was exciting! After doing workshop, we created a video but we’re focusing on Khmer audience since there is no video for Khmer people to watch about Lucky Iron Fish. Watch down below.

Siem Reap

We spent about 6 hours to drive from Phom Penh to Siem Reap. When we arrived the hotel, everyone putted their stuffs away and that evening we relaxed for a while then came back together to practice our presentation that’ll happened in the next few days. We got dinner at the place nearby. At night we went to PUB Street, and Night Market. I saw a lot of clothes, paintings, furniture, necklaces, bracelets and many things and I think Cambodian made those. I didn’t buy anything cause I don’t really want to. My teacher told me that we should find something small, cheap, and meaningful and I didn’t find it at all. But I did enjoy seeing those, one thing I really like was to see the quotes that they wrote on the shirt and some of them were really funny and some of them I used to see before in internet. We continued walking a long the street, seeing different people. Mostly I saw foreigner not really Cambodian maybe it was a tourism place at night.

The next day, we visited Angkor Wat which was one of the most famous temple in Siem Reap. We went there to see beautiful sunrise. After that we walked around the temple to see many different sculptures and we learned about the history of the temple from our Khmer teacher.

We left Angkor Wat and continued to a place called Landmine Museum. I saw real mines that used during the war! It was a pleasure to be there cause I learned from it. I listened to a podcast that was about mines in Cambodia, watched a documentary and read amazing different stories people met.

In the afternoon we visited a place called Kbal Spean. It was connected to Koulen Mountain. We walked about 2km to see the waterfall there. Acutually we didn’t see the waterfall, we saw a small one that has carving under it. We sat for a while than walked back to our bus cause we need to continue to another place. Walking a long that mountain was really hard for me cause there are many big rocks and we didn’t really have a proper road.

We tried to leave Kbal Spean as soon as possible because we need to have a tour at the Future Khmer Children. Sometimes we made fun of the acronym of this title, it was FKC but sometimes we confused to call it as KFC which was a restaurant and we always laughed about it. We wanted to have a tour there cause we’re going to have a workshop there and we saw many kids learning computer, English, sewing and music. I think it was a very cool place.

The next two days, we’re focusing on the workshops. We did four of them, 2 in different villages, morning and afternoon. In our workshop, we taught them the importance of lucky iron fish, anemia caused by iron deficiency, eating healthy food and how to use the iron fish. We then distributed the fish to each family. We hope that they will use it in every food they cook to help reducing anemia in the country.

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