Author: r1chan

I really need to finish this writing before my computer dies.

Recently, across Cambodia, there’s an electricity black-out that deters productivity in schools, businesses, houses, and so on. In Phnom Penh, at where I live, we only have electricity for half of the day during the hottest months of the year. Can you imagine?

Houses, buildings that are connected to the national grids suffer from this for about 3 months, starting in April. Only places that have generator can have a full-day electricity. It’s 21st century, yet I can’t charge my computer right now and the electricity system is not reliable.

What happened?

Cambodia’s biggest electricity source is hydropower plants, covering about 48.5% of the total electricity production. During the hottest months of the year, guess what happened? Low water level. This low level makes it hard for the dams to generate electricity by using water waves. This is what happened in a nutshell.

But, it’s already June, so it’s kind of over. But, knowing it exists, what does it tell us about our electricity reliability? Can we keep relying heavily on hydropower dams to electrify our country? What are some alternatives that we should shift our visions toward?

These are questions that we tackle in Cambodia energy sector. This year, I’ve been involved in helping to produce contents that relate to the energy sector and how this sector have a huge impact on the Cambodia economy.

We intended to create a website that has diverse contents that would deliver relevant information to the audience. In energy sector–for instance, we created a podcast that talks about the hydropower plants construction in Cambodia, its seen and unseen costs, recent electricity black-out, and the alternatives we can look forward to.

All these contents will be uploaded into our Cambodia economy website, so stay tune if you’re up for exploring the economy of Cambodia!

If anyone were to ask me what’s the proudest moment or thing of this school year, I’ll probably say that I talked a lot.

You can call me talkative or whatever. Yet, most of the time, I’m still socially shy and awkward, but I mean that’s every teens’ issue, right? So yes, I’m talkative. I love debates and I get into arguments often.

Some people’s proudest moment might probably be winning a competition, accomplished a mountain-stacked work, got a 5 on AP exams or above 1400 on the SAT. But, my version of proud is that I talked a lot on topics that matter.

On May 5th, I along with seven other members hosted a Rainbow Summit that is dedicated to talk in our own own language, Khmer, about various aspects of the LGBTQ+ community and advocate for their rights.

We have spent approximately about 3 months, meeting each other 2-3 hours every weekend to organize this summit. Since we have this one ambition together, we never feel torn or exhausted from doing all the work. Because we’re passionate. We knew since the beginning that we’re not experts and we’re not going to be able to give everyone all the answers they want, but we have our primary goal: to be the conversation starters who impose a new perspective to our conservative country.

In Cambodia, members of the LGBTQ+ community suffer paramount discrimination due to the existence of a non-accepting society. In our summit, we’ve organized into four sessions: Language, Culture, Laws, and Health and Violence. 

Through constructive conversations and relevant activities, we were able to explain difficult and sensitive concepts to the audience who are young teenagers from 4 high schools. In Health and Violence session, led by me and another friend, we talked about the mental health issues that have happened in the LGBTQ+ community. In one of our activities, we asked the participants to closed their eyes and imagine that they are heterosexuals and live in a world in which heterosexuality is discriminated against. And in fact, people feel oppressed and cried. We further explained to them the pressure that we, individually, have put to the community and how we instigate violence.

I can speak powerfully and strongly of my session and I also can speak of other sessions, but if you visit my friends’ blogs who were also leaders of this summit, you would find a more elaborated and thorough highlight of their sessions. Names of them are included here: thiny, makara, sreynith, theara, kimseng, venghour, and samnangn. You can replace “rika” above with any one of these names. 

Why did we do it? Because it matters. We never think, for once, that this isn’t our business even though some of us are heterosexual. It’s everyone business. That mindset is everything, so unless we have a vaccine in which we can inject this perspective to everyone, this summit is necessary.

“Should she conceal or reveal?”

“Challenging status quo through entrepreneurship”

“Cambodian Romeo and Juliet: Tum Teav”

These are some headlines that will lead you thought-provoking articles written by our academy’s senior students and published in our newspaper website, Liger Edge. Liger Edge is hoping to deliver to readers articles with quality content that encompass events in our academy as well as global and local news. Furthermore, we hope to encourage the culture of reading and writing in Cambodia as well as worldwide.

Fullfill your day by perusing through various articles from our young and vibrant writers!

On the 5th of October, it is the official launch of our school’s newspaper called the ‘Liger Edge’ !! There are a lot of incredible things happen in Liger and the only platforms we can use to share our stories are through Facebook and Instagram; furthermore, we can only write a few sentences. Therefore, we feel the need to create a school’s newspaper to spread stories of Liger in details. 

The newspaper is digital and we’ve established two websites for Khmer and English. We have 8 different categories: Features, Culture, Current Events, Stories of Change, A day in the Life, Opinion, Sports, and Caption this. We have 7 members in our team, all responsible as editors of each category. I am the editor in chief of Feature articles category.  So far, I’ve written three articles, though, not all are published. My first article talked about our new facilitators in this 2018-2019 school year. So, why don’t you check it out:

As We Fail – Features – Rika

Through writing these articles, I get a chance to enhance my writing skill and spur other students to share their voices through their writings. 

Our website has not yet been fully functioning, so sorry for this inconvenience. However, I hope my article above can act as a sneak peek to the incredible world of writings of our students.