Category: Exploration

This is the first exploration of the new year and it is called Household garden. Household Gardens is a project which is trying to promote organic  vegetable in Cambodia also try to identify the problem why we import a lot of vegetables from outside and why we can’t afford the vegetables inside our country. For the past years, Cambodia has imported vegetables from other countries such as Vietnam and Thailand. Right now the local needs to import 140 tons to fit the demand of people, and we can only produce 400 tons inside the country. But people believe and think that a lot of vegetables in local are chemical and most vegetables that chemical are from the import of other countries. This exploration is focused on how we can help the community grow more vegetables for local by started with a small garden in each house so that they won’t need to buy vegetables from local market which can also avoid them from scared of chemical vegetables. But this is going to be a long term exploration so the first round of this exploration will be about us studying technical vegetable plantation such as nutrients needed for plants (NPK), the symptoms of deficiency NPK, organic compost, liquid fertilizer, organic pesticide, seed selection, chemical versus non-chemical vegetables, and harmful effects of chemical use on vegetables and we hope to write a manure at the end of the round about all of the technical vegetable plantation to help the farmers learn. We also have a trip to SomboSabay which is a community in Takeo province who plant organic vegetables and organic compost. We go there to learn about some technical organic vegetable planting and also learn about organic compost and liquid compost. We also go to Mr. Ros Mao house who teach us about his own way of planting organic vegetables and  also learn about organic pesticide, Organic compost and liquid compost. After we come back we started to plan for planting our own garden in our school where we divided into 4 groups and plant two vegetable per group. My groups plant Okra and bitter eggplant and we need to try the technique from Mr. Ros Mao and SomboSambay in order to know if the technical work for us so that we have an example for the farmer before we go and teach them.  

The third exploration of this year is Outdoor leadership. Outdoor leadership has taught me more about the outside world and nature. Before, when I heard or saw the word forest it felt like the forest was so scary and dangerous for me. When I saw animals, especially crickets, snakes, or birds, I either told my dad to kill it or I tried to kill it. But outdoor leadership taught me that all of those animals and things are also natural, they also want to live. They won’t hurt you if you don’t hurt them. That makes me sad, knowing all of the bad things that I did to nature. Now when I see an animal, I walk off. I’m not going to hurt them if they are not going to hurt me. And that is just a very good way to think and know. Outdoor leadership taught me that life is hard. If you just sit in the house and wait for rice to cook with all the electricity and a lighter. You will never know how life is hard. After all 7 weeks in this exploration, I feel like outdoor leadership means life without any stuff and supplies around you and how can you live without it. People right now live with nearly everything done for them. A lot of people, when they want food,they just go online or to the store to buy it. If they want rice, they go to the market and buy it or just put rice inside the automatic rice cooker and it cooks!! But they don’t know how hard is it to find one of the ingredients of the food. They don’t know where to find it. One more thought is to explore the beauty of nature. When you look at nature at the outside, it looks so scary, dangerous, and afraid. But when you go into it, explore it, learn about it you will see how beautiful nature is. After this exploration, I feel like I got to know more things in nature. I also learned how to help when there are people injured in the woods and I feel like if there is a time when this kind of problem happens, I can help them and guide other people to help too. All of the helping skills, making shelter, learning to survive in the woods, and walking a lot of kilometers through the woods makes me an outdoor leader.The first thing that I will do to share my knowledge with others to help protect natural spaces in Cambodia is to start with the people near me. It can be my family, my friend, every person around me and when they learn it and know it from me, they will tell their family and their friends too. It will continue and it is a great way to Started with. Because no one will listen to you if they don’t know you, so you need to teach the people around you first and then people that are your friends might also know people that you don’t know, and friends of your friends might also know someone that you and your friends don’t know. One more way is social media; you can share it on Facebook, you can share it with Youtube, you can share it on websites and people can check it out and learn it.. But it all started with the people next to you and the people that you know.

Traditional food is the second exploration this year. Our goal is to learn about the type of traditional food and ingredient to document for our next generation to know about our traditional food. In this exploration, we mainly focusing to make a product such as a Video, journalism, and photo. To make all the product finish by seven-week we need to divide into this three group so I am in the photo group. My goal is to take a lot of pictures to make a photo essay about all the places and food that we went too. In the third week, we got to go to Siem Reap to learn the traditional food from the restaurant. They are Mahob, Cousin Wat Dammnak, and Sugar palm. We went to all of this restaurant and do a lot of interviews to get more information about the food. When we come back we started to take all the information to make our product and these are all the product that we make: