As you might know, last year I and a group of students went down to Kirirom National Park and Mondulkiri for hiking in an exploration called Outdoor Leadership. It was a great experience for me to really observe the beauty of nature and see all different types of species. Throughout this project, I’ve learned a lot from nature and I’ve changed a lot of my perspective towards nature. Not a lot of Cambodian youth had experienced living in nature as us and not a lot of them knew how much humans had a negative impact on nature.
In addition, this year for round 2 I and a group of students are working on designing a program for Cambodian youths to learn more about nature outdoors which consists mainly of workshops and a short trip. For this round, we just only focus on designing the workshop plan which we divide into four sections. Those are Nature Appreciation, Leadership Skill, Medical and Risk Management and the last one is Wilderness. With these four sections, we believe we can take away a lot and can deeply understand what nature is and how they can help protect nature as well as how they can be more aware of their behaviour towards nature.
After we’ve done many workshop practices with our team, we actually went down to Kampong Cham to try our first official Workshop with KAPE but we couldn’t go on a trip with them since we have some timing issues. However, the workshop went very well. We all were engaged and active. We did our four-sections workshop and it was very cool.
During the round, we also went to Oral, which is the highest mountain in Kampong Speu, to practice our leadership skills. Our facilitators had to act as our participants which they gave us a lot of simulations for us to counter. As a leader, it’s not easy but one important key to a good leader is how you work and communicate well. We did really well on communicating which we all worked closely together and we did it. It was a great experience to be a leader of the team. I feel like I’ve learned a lot from my team and a whole trip.
Overall, it was a great process so far, and I desire to work more on it and actually make it real. I can’t wait to work more with students out there around Cambodia!