“Always change yourself first” people would say to me when I want to change something such as when my sister is mad at me and I want to change her into a peaceful person. And yes, I just understand it when I was 11 years old. My sister was mad at me because I was mad at her. Then, I remember the Change Yourself First. Then I started to calm down and my sister was doing the same thing too. And I realized that I was changing my sister. My teacher always said “If you want to change your country, you have to start changing yourself first. Then, change your family. After that, you can start to change your village or community, district, province or your country”. It was a really good advice and I like it. I have so many things that I wanna change. I have the idea of changing by doing some exploration and the reality of things that happen every day in front of me.
The first thing that I always see in the rural area is The Contaminated Water. People usually carry the water from the lake or river nearby. As I see, they just pure the water into the big jar and keep it. They drink it whenever want, but they don’t boil or filter it. That is the problem. There are germs in the water that cause people to be sick. I always feel mad at myself because I always think of a question. The question is “Why Can’t I drink water from the tap like people in The US”. When I first saw people drink tap water, I think that it is funny, but then I think it is useful. We don’t have to filter or boil the water. The water is already clean from the tap. And it is safe for us to drink. I don’t know what to do to make the water from the tap clean like the water in the US yet, but I think of something to make the water clean from the tap. My idea is to have a big place to make the water 100.9% clean. And we can only use water from that place. The water will run from that place through the pipe at our house. We just need to open the tap and drink. We don’t need to worry about the germs.
The second problem that I usually see is Arsenic in the water. It is really painful to have Arsenic in the water that we drink. Arsenic causes lots of diseases that we can even get from it. Mostly, the disease kills us. I don’t wanna describe how the people would look like if they have the arsenic’s disease because it is a really painful picture that sometimes, I even cry a few time when I see it for the first time. I don’t know if the disease can be cured or not because most people die from it. I have no solution to this problem, but I have an idea. Even if I have an idea already, but it is not easy to follow my instruction. As you know some places in Cambodia don’t have clean water. So, the solution that people do is to dig a well. As you know the arsenic in the underground water. So, when there is much arsenic in the water that we drink, we can cause disease from it. When people drink the Arsenic water, they have no choice. They don’t have enough water to buy the clean and safe water. So, my idea is to move people from the place where the arsenic is. You might wanna ask How Will Those People Get Money To Buy Or Build A New Home? So, if you wanna ask that question, I also have the solution to solve that problem. The solution is to collect $1 from everyone in Cambodia to help those people. The population in Cambodia is around 15 million. If all of us help to donate the money, we will have at least 15 million dollars and we can help lots of people from that money. I think that is really cool because we are doing a good thing in our life. You might also wanna ask Who is the one responsible for keeping the money? My answer is “I have no idea yet”. So, I wanna you all so give me some idea after reading my essay.
I also participated in an exploration call Historical Symbolism. I really proud of my self (proud, but not too proud) because I got to know the meaning of some statue in my country. In Cambodia, every province has at least the one statue to represent that province. Also, there is a meaning behind each statue. Even though, if you buy a statue and put it in front of the gate at your house, it also has a meaning or purpose such as putting it for decoration or represent something for your house. In Cambodia, the government plan to put a statue in every province at least one to represent the symbol of that province. I think it is really important to know every statue in our country because it is something that related to our culture or country. Example, a foreigner came to visit your country and he/she saw a very interesting statue. He/She ask you about the meaning or the reason of the putting the statue there and you said that you don’t know. How would you feel? I don’t know what you are feeling, but for me, I feel so guilty and so embarrassed because it is the statue in our country and we don’t things about our country. I would feel embarrassed when the people from other country come to teach us about things in my own country. Knowing the meaning of the statue in our country can also help protect our traditional culture and our old statue. I said it help protects our old statue because sometimes, people are going to remove out the statue because they don’t know the meaning and the purpose of that statue.
I think I am a part of Cambodia Changing last year. I think I did those changing when I join Technovation. My group was one of the finalist group who was chosen to compete at the International Pitch in San Francisco. We didn’t win the first place, but when we come back from San Francisco, there were some journalists to come to interview us. In every interview, we always say something that really inspires other girls to become a part of technology. We can let them be a part of technology by letting them learn to code or just let them participate in Technovation. I said that they can be a part of technology by participating in Technovation because this program is created for girls to create apps. Most girls and women and Cambodia always think that they can’t do that technology stuff the same as boys and men do. In my opinion, I don’t think it is right. Everyone can do anything that they think it is right and they want to do. If boys can do it, girls can do it too. In the interview, my team always encourage girls to not be shy or scare to show their talent in technology to the world to see. And I think that the inspirational quotes that we had spoken in the interview are working very well because this year, girls that had participated in Technovation is a lot more than last year. We also proud of ourself because our team is the youngest team who continued to the global pitch in 2017. Also, we are the first team in Cambodia who make it to the global. We also feel great that we can inspire lots of girls in our country to join Technovation and learn about technology. The greatest feeling that we have is when the journalist come to interview us because we usually saw people interview Stars on the TV and now we feel like we are one of the famous Stars.
I saw some senior at my school did an exploration about gender equity. I really enjoy the presentation. I like the word equity better than equality. Here an example of the word equality. The word equality means that you got the equal chance to go the get the orange. Everyone get a chair to stand on to make themselves taller to reach the branches of the orange tree. Some of the people are already tall. They don’t need the chair to stand on, but you are small and you still cannot reach the branch of the orange tree even though, you have a chair. You need one more chair. This is call equality because everyone gets equal things. This an example of equity. All of the people who have the chance to get the orange gets one chair. The tall people who know that they can reach the orange branch without the chair. So, they give you their chair because they know that you need one more chair to reach your goal (reach your orange branch). This means equity because you share the stuff(anything) that you get equally to other people that need more. I’m writing about this topic because the place that I live, most people don’t really value women or girl. Most people said that Men need to work and Women need to stay at home to cook and look after the kids and the house. Women can’t play sports. These are the word that most people usually say. Also, in the place that I live, people call men or boys who act themselves as the women and girl, Banana. I don’t know why they called those people like that. It doesn’t even make any sense. For me, everyone can do anything that they want to do. Girls can play sports. Boys can wear dresses. Women can be presidents. Boys can cook. Women and girls can be strong. And Boys can cry. I don’t want people to say, Boys or men must be strong, so don’t cry or women must stay in the house and cook, then let the men work. Everyone can be anything that they dream to be. Today, most girls are crying because they always hear those gender discrimination. So, what do you think about women right in Cambodia or your country? They don’t feel good when they walk alone. They wish that they are men. Most of them always feel bad about their lives because they always think that being a woman is difficult. There’s still lots of violence and discrimination to women, especially in rural area. Do you know? If you are a girl in the rural area and you tell your parent that you want to be a person who works in a company, they will just don’t care about what you say because they think that you can’t do it. Most parents in the rural area don’t let their daughter finish the college or get into college. Most parents in the rural area want their daughters to work in factories. For now, I don’t want people to really focus on men gender equality, but first, let do some women gender equity and think about both gender equality in the next time.