Category: Explorations

I am currently is working with Happy Football Cambodia Australia founder to make two videos every month, a trailer and a video episode. There, we are learning how to work with a real businessman. First time we turned in our first videos, there were lots of changes for us to make, but we are trying to improve as we go along. We now have created a clearer plan for our next episodes to keep having our videos finish on time. We have released our first episode on the HFCA’s Facebook page. You can check out the link below.

Link to the HFCA’s facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/happyfootballcambodiaaustralia/

June 8th, 2018

The end of my 2017 – 2018 school year has approached really quickly. It ended with three amazing performances by our seniors and juniors students of a play, The Network. The play was mainly about how people used the network as part of their daily life and how it has an impact on people in both positive and negative way. The play was about 90 minutes long. I do think acting is fun, but I decided to try on taking on a new job, which I had no clue of what I would be doing to get my job done; I only knew that I would not be involved in acting at all. I was asked by my teacher, Alli, if I wanted to become our play’s stage manager. I thought about it overnight and I said “Yes”. It was a huge risk for me, but with some support from my teacher, I figured out what to do. In class, I would be helping to give advice to actors about where they should be standing as well as offering suggestions for improvement. I also took control of our production side: light cues, sound cues, costumes, and props as well as making sure my people were doing work that was assigned. We did our play at the Department of Performing Arts on the 6th, 7th and 8th of June. Before the play and during the play, a job as a stage manager was tough for me. I had to make sure our props were all in place, our lights were correctly programmed, our sounds were ready to go, etc. We had some issues with lights, but we finally figured it out. I was wrapped in wires with a walkie-talkie so I could communicate with my teammates while running the play. I was stressed out, but I did try to calm myself down and kept working at my best. I was proud of people’s comment about the play itself; I realized that I did it and that I had done my job! Taking risk is tough and feel uncomfortable, but we better take risks to experience what is new in order to explore what we are not capable of.

March 30th

My happiness comes from people’s smile. If I can do any skills that I am capable of doing to fulfill people’s needs, I would do so. I am proud to be one of the Surveying exploration’s member. Our main goal was to create our own, precise survey to collect data about three villages down at Kampong Speu, one of the provinces in Cambodia. We will analyze the data by ourselves and write them out or display them in a graph or a table so we could express villages’ condition so we could prove the villages’ situation to potential donors. In doing this project, we were working with Camkids, an organization down there, that started to help to improve the villagers’ livelihood down at the three villages since Camkids was created. We were focusing on people’s income and expenses, health and nutrition and education. We created questions for each category. We tried our best to get rid of response bias questions as much as we can due to the wordings of our questions. We then tested them out with our school’s staffs to see if the questions make sense to them. We went down to Kampong Speu with some volunteers to help us surveying families those three villages. Each survey took us about 30 to 45 minutes and we surveyed 103 families in a day. We tried to keep our surveying technique as not bias as possible, but still, the survey was a convenient sample and there were two or three questions that were misunderstood by our volunteers. We got back to school and started to organize all the data and try many sorts of way to display our data in a precise way as possible. It took us somewhere around two weeks looking at all the questions and see which one we can eliminate and which one we can analyze. I am impressed with the works I’ve achieved in this project and I am looking forward to seeing those analyses on Camkids’ website and I am hoping to know that my data can actually attract potential donors into helping to improve villagers’ livelihood in these three villages. 

Name of course: Zoonotics Diseases 

Learning Facilitator: Kieran ONeil

Number of students:  11

Course Description:

During this exploration course, I’ve been learning about Zoonotics Diseases in Cambodia. In this class, we mainly focused on the learning of Rabies. Rabies is really a big issue in Cambodia since a data that was recorded by Pasture Institute in 2009, there are about 5 million dogs in Cambodia, which is also 1/3 of the population. In addition to this, there are approximately 800 people died out of Rabies that was recorded by Pasture only, which made us think that the data is still underestimated; there could be more. We worked with many people from Phnom Penh Animal Welfare Society (PPAWs), Animals Rescue Cambodia (ARC) as well as Pasture Institute to support them with spreading Rabies awareness. Besides that, we also went on trips with them to help with their free vaccination project as well as health checks for dogs and cats. It was difficult, but fun at the same time! Especially when I love dogs! I am really looking forward for the future event that will be held by ARC to give free Rabies vaccination on the 7th of February! 

20th January, 2018

My current exploration, Public Health that is currently focusing on learning about Rabies in Cambodia were down on a mission with Phnom Penh Animal Welfare Society (PPAWs) in Mundol Kiri to help spreading Rabies awareness as well as getting dogs and cats to give rabies vaccines as well as health check and doing castration. We were there and helped to gather people around the community to get their pets to the place. We also helped with some injections to the animals, washing up the materials, holding animals while they’re getting surgeries and giving them massage after the surgery. I really love the experience since I feel like I helped lots of dogs and cats afterward especially because I am a dog lover. The one time that I can’t forget helping a Golden Retriever because he’s such a big dog, but the doctors did help. His owner only planned to castrate his dog, but the dog ended getting another surgery because he can’t urinate. The doctors found out that the dog has cancer. The doctors couldn’t get the big ball out, but they did get the urine out hoping to save the dog’s life to live longer. After three hours of hard work, we helped the dog! I was there for the whole surgery and I somehow felt like I wanted to cry for a few times because I was sympathetic for the dog to go through this and when sometimes he was awake because the unconscious taste were gone, he moaned. I found it a really amazing experience and I am really looking forward for the future mission with Animal Rescue Cambodia on February 7th.   

December 13th, 2017

For the Public Health exploration, we went on another trip to Animal Rescue Cambodia to learn more about the Rabies as well as to make connection, so that we can help them out to solve Rabies problems. They are happy about it and they are now agreed to work with us on injecting Rabies vaccine into animals from various communities. We are really looking forward to working with them and help to vaccinate as many animals as we can at the start of February. Reduce the death of Rabies!

I am currently learning in an Exploration which is about Zoonotic Disease. In this project, we are basically focusing on helping to raise awareness about Rabies in Cambodia. There are about 5 million dogs in Cambodia, which is about 1/3 of the population. There are also about 800 people that die under the cause of Rabies every year. These data are based on Pasture Institute Cambodia. To get a sense of what people have been doing as well as what we can help out to solve Rabies problems, we went down to Phnom Penh Animal Welfare Society (PPAWs) just to learn about Rabies as well as about what we can help them out. PPAWs has agreed to bring us with them to Mondolkiri from the 19th of January to 22nd of January to help them out to inject dogs and cats as well as raising awareness to people there since Rabies is a really big issue. I am really looking forward to help people there!

Name of course: Animation

Learning Facilitator: Sothea 

Number of students: 12

Course Description:

Drawing plays a huge role in animation. Animators require drawing as part of their background. There were so many drawing tips that were taught to us. We practiced drawing various pictures of things like human, animals, plants and so on. I found it tough, but I knew that it wasn’t impossible. Besides drawing in class, we were all required to draw 20 drawings per week of anything we want to further our skills. We also had a trip to iThinkAsia, which is an animation studio to get an idea of the animation process. After I’ve done all of these work, I know how difficult it was to animate a movie that could entertain the entire world since there were so many artworks, sounds, and designs involved in the process. To publish a movie that is about an hour long could take animators years to do it.