My second year at the Liger Leadership Academy is going to end really soon, but by the time you’re reading this, it has already ended. Most of the year passed by really quickly. This year at Liger was way different from last year in terms of work and responsibility. I got to be involved in explorations which was something new this year. As some of the seniors mentioned in their blogs, there are five rounds of explorations in each school year and each exploration lasts 7 weeks. My five explorations are Geography Of Cambodia, Liger Wilderness Field Guide, Entrepreneurship, Theater Set Design, and Geography Book Design. All of my explorations has made at least little changes in spite of where the changes took place. Two of my explorations are soon going to really change Cambodia in the following months, before 2018 ends and they are Theater Set Design and Geography Book Design.
At the start of this year, one of the teachers started a project called the Cambodian Geography Book and the name is pretty self-explanatory. The goal of this project was to make a unique and interesting book about the geography of Cambodia for government schools and other people that are interested in learning about Cambodia. The project was divided into seven explorations and I was lucky enough to be in the first one; it was also my first exploration of the year. Our main goal in this exploration was to gather as much information as we can about the central and northern part of Cambodia; these two parts of Cambodia was referred to as region 1. The provinces in this region are Tboung Khmum, Siem Reap, Preah Vihear, Kampong Thom, Kampong Cham, and Oddar Meanchey. Our exploration was divided into three parts, pre-trip, trip, and post-trip. The pre-trip is the first three weeks, the trip is the week after, and the post-trip is the last three weeks. What we did during the pre-trip was gather information about the five themes of the provinces in our region. The five themes were physical systems, infrastructure, environment and society, location in spatial terms, places and regions. To make it easier to research, we split into groups of 3. Each group was assigned a theme to do research on; my group was assigned the theme physical system. The trip is self-explanatory; we went to the provinces in our region. Our goals for the trip was to experience the geographical highlights of each province and do interviews to get a story of any kind to put into the book. We got more than 27 interviews from the trip and the places that we went to were amazing. After we got back, we did research on the history of each province and made predictions. I’d say that this was a really good first step to making the book. Keep in mind that there are six more explorations related to the Cambodian Geography book, three of them is the same as this one, except that they each focused on a different region of Cambodia and the other three explorations focused entirely on book publication. Continue reading “Changing Cambodia (2017-2018)”