Wow, what a week...

I haven’t been frequent on my blogs this week due to the fact it has been the busiest week ever!

Technically, this has been our last week of volunteering, even though we still have two weeks left- we closed all of our sessions and made them spectacular!

Over the last few months we have been helping Spok Reach promote their business successfully and bring tourism to traditional Khmer Boxing (La Bokator), teaching them how to successfully set up social media pages such as Facebook and Trip Advisor. Their Facebook has now reached over 300 likes and their trip advisor page is number 6 in the province. We also taught the entire C-BED programme and leadership skills. The next (and last) task we had to do, was to help SR film a promotional video. This included interviews, performances and a lot of fun!

I tried to learn some Khmer boxing myself but it didn’t quite go to plan!

Some of the members from other teams came to join us in the session and the photos, it was nice for them to experience Spok Reach and their exceptional talents that we entrepreneurship have been since striving in placement! This session was actually just under 3 hours long which is an hour longer than usual, sometimes 2 as they’re late often! Khmer have this concept called “Khmer time” which pretty much means that they’re always late. We’re pretty used to it, it’s normal now.

It was sad to say goodbye to Spok Reach, especially as we have bonded with many of them over social media, they’re our friends. Khmer boxing is an artistic and beautiful way to teach and demonstrate self defence to women and men. It has been a pleasure learning about this art and helping this cultural club blossom.

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Our closing session with CLC was still successful but less so. Due to the short numbers again, we did a recap session to see what the students had learnt. They showed very little progress but we understood that the younger students were too little to comprehend entrepreneurship. They did ask (and will receive) all of our flip charts and sessions we have done so far which was a good sign from the partners.

During the week we also filmed an interview with a clothes shop owner in the community. This helped boost and promote her business whilst also showing the video to CLC and teaching them how to successfully create their own business!

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Rachel and Chantea did an amazing ACD on gender equality. It was interesting and frustrating at the same time to listen to the Khmer volunteers on women and how they dress. For example, the men were saying that if a woman gets assulted whilst wearing a short skirt then it is the woman’s fault. However, if they get assaulted wearing covering clothes, then it is the mans fault. We had to be respectful of their culture and try not to enforce our values on them but this proved pretty challenging throughout the ACD.

Julinda, myself and Vesena organised this weeks 2 hour team meeting. During this, we focused on mental health and well-being throughout placement, played Khmer games with hilarious forfeits and we held the first Srae Thmei‘s got talent! We tried to make this as fun and upbeat as possible as morale has been low recently. We also did the best we could with what we had in regards to our poster!

Beforehand, we made named envelopes for everyone and stuck them on the wall with a sign saying “I’m feeling blue”. During the meeting, we asked everyone to write anonymous compliments about different people in the team and place them inside the envelopes.

When you’re having a bad day, are missing home or just need a little pick me up, you can walk over and pick out a compliment from your envelope which will hopefully help you see the beautiful in yourself, inside and out.

Srae Thmei‘s Got Talent was the funniest activity ever! I was on the judging panel with Vesena and Kheeang, giving critical feedback and scores out of 10. We had amazing acts such as an accapella mash up group, khmer traditional dancing and countdown!

The winner was Ed who wowed us with his amazing magic tricks... even if he did mess one up!

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This week we had a lady who works for VSO fly to Cambodia to visit us. We had to prepare presentations on our progress here and challenges. This was really helpful as we explained all our struggles and the things that needed to be changed during the next cycles. She was also impressed with the progress and perseverance we had shown throughout the cycle and wished us the best of luck with our last 2 weeks. All of our comments will be passed on to people higher up in VSO and hopefully taken action against.

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Finally, today we held our second and final Community Action Day. We chose the topic “plastic” and each team did a stage of “reduce, reuse, recycle”. The layout of this CAD was different as we had over 100 students who had come during the school holidays to learn! We couldn’t possibly fit them all in one room so the teams spent 20-30 minutes in each room before rotating. This was completed with lots of fun energisers and games!

The first class we went into, I had an absolute blast. I’m not sure what was so funny, but our team dynamic is great and even though it’s two UK and two Khmer, we always have so much fun and joke around!

Our first poster involved talking about the impact of plastic in the world.

Did you know: 400,000-1,000,000 people die in developing countries each year due to illnesses caused by mismanaged plastic waste?

Employment also did a poster explaining that by burning plastic plastic and inhaling the fumes in the community, it is just as bad for your body as smoking a packet of cigarettes a day!

Our second poster explained how long different items and types of plastic take to biodegrade. A single plastic bottle can take 450 years to biodegrade.

Our final poster explained how to reduce your plastic usage in a developing country.

The children this morning were delights (even if we did have to get up super early) and lots of iced green tea got me through the day!

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The rest of the week between all the big bits involved lots of planning, drawing, teamwork and more planning!

Time for the weekend = a nice deserved lie in tomorrow! I’m not sure what’s really in store next week in regards to work apart from debriefing but I can promise more blogs!

Enjoy the weekend everyone xox