Water Rocket Project

For those of you who don't follow me on Facebook, I thought I'd let you share in the fundraising fun!  I will be writing a much more detailed blog about this project once it's completed, but for now I'm in the beginning stages and working to just get enough money to complete my final project in my community.
My final project consists of this: taking the entire school and getting them to build rockets out of plastic bottles, plastic sheeting and tape.  They will then propel these rockets using water and an air pump.  There will be a huge contest to see which rocket travels the farthest, so they'll have to use their smarts to figure out the perfect pressure and angle to use.  This project was completely thought up and designed by one of my amazing Cambodian counterparts, I'm just helping out with the budgeting and planning, which is exactly how I like it.

This project is really important to me, because science education in Cambodia is lacking any hands-on experiments or real-life application.  I don't think I would have made it through a single science class without those, so it's amazing what these kids have been able to learn despite that.  I mean, can you imagine biology without microscopes or chemistry without test tubes?

This project requires very little sophisticated equipment, and after the air pumps are purchased and the launchers made, my school will be able to use them year after year and repeat this project with very little cost to them.  Sustainability is my middle name!  

Everyone has been AMAZING so far and even though my grant has only been up for 4 days I only have $63.50 left to raise.  Even if you can only take care of that last 50 cents, I'll be eternally grateful!

Just follow this link and remember that all your donations to Peace Corps go directly to the community AND they are tax deductible!  What a deal!

https://donate.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=donate.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=14-303-012

This Place About to GLOOOOOW (This should be sung to the tune of “Blow” by Ke$ha)

It was that time of year again.  GLOW TIME!  For those of you who are unfamiliar, Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World) is a leadership camp for girls that is held annually in a lot of Peace Corps countries, including Cambodia.  Although the idea behind the camp and acronym are old hats, it’s up to each Peace Corps Volunteer to put their own spin on it and make it their own. 

This year was quite a different story, since my group of volunteers were now the “veterans” and responsible for most of the planning.  Planning any event is stressful, but planning an event in a country where time is not exactly of the essence and Murphy’s Law is inevitable, is a bit of a different challenge.  Needless to say, I was a bit stressed out, but it was a good reminder that I can still hack it in the real world and I probably won’t die in graduate school. 

Aside from a few very minor hiccups, everything went really well and I’ve gotta say, it’s all because I have a pretty extraordinary group of volunteers in my province.  The thing about PCVs is that they are not always awesome, but everyone who lives in Takeo certainly is. 

The team in our awesome Camp GLOW shirts

 But most importantly, I had a really great time with my students and I hope they learned a lot!  It was a three-day workshop spanning topics from women’s health, sex trafficking, CV writing, all the way to healthy relationships.  The girls also got to spend the third day at the beach picking up trash, learning about the downfalls of plastic and, of course, eating seafood and playing around on the beach.  Cambodia’s not so rough on the eyes sometimes. 

 

Making our country beautiful 

Camp GLOW is such a unique experience for these girls, since it’s the first time many of them have stayed the night somewhere other than their home, and the first time some of them have even left their district.  A lot of the topics we discuss, like women’s health and sex trafficking, are not commonly brought up, so I think it’s really important to start getting these topics in the common discourse. 

Brainstorming ideas about cooperation in relationships

Learning

It’s hard to know if these camps are ever really as effective as we hope for them to be, but it’s easy to see the difference in the girls I brought with me.  Since Camp GLOW, their confidence in class has risen and even the shyest girls were willing to stand up in front of their class and tell them what they learned.  And if nothing else, the smiles I got to see all weekend were well worth it.  

Competition Culture

A few weeks ago I had the wonderful opportunity to participate in a Spelling Bee with four of my students.  To be honest, I wasn’t super pumped about this project.  Sure, it was a spelling bee.  Whatever.  I’d probably have a few students participate and it would be just something else for my English club to focus on for a few weeks.  But life is funny in that way where the things you least expect to enjoy turn out to be one of your most memorable experiences. 

The students were given a list with about 300 words with varying degrees of difficulty.  My four students struggled during our first few practices and I wasn’t too optimistic about the results of this competition.  However, as the weeks went on my students really surprised me and studied that list like their lives depended on it.  At the provincial spelling bee, two of my students placed first in their grade division, meaning they got to travel to Phnom Penh for the national spelling bee! 

My student, Raisy, getting ready for the Provincial Spelling Bee

Choyi spelling a word P-E-R-F-E-C-T-L-Y at the National Spelling Bee

Needless to say, they were very excited.  There were tears of joy and also tears of disappointment from those who were not able to move on.  This was an entirely new experience for most of my students, since competition is not commonplace in Cambodian culture.  While men will sometimes compete while they play sports, there are few other games that are as intense as say…Monopoly Deal.  Even competing for grades is not really a common practice since the “sharing” of answers on tests is rampant throughout classrooms and seen almost as a necessity. 

This brought me to think about America and how competition-driven our culture is.  I’ve been competing in things since preschool, and probably even before then.  And while competition has taught me a lot (for example, how to take awesome photos with trophies) it hasn’t always fostered the greatest sense of community.  Constantly competing for better grades or better mock trial parts or a better job definitely drives people to do better, but does it really make us better people? 

But I hope my students’ experience in this competition will be remembered very similar to how I remember the various competitions throughout my life.  I can’t tell you every grade I’ve ever gotten or what my scores were in my 8^th grade History Day Competition.  I can’t tell you what place my broadcast news team got at the speech club competition in Des Moines and I can’t even tell you what place we got in most of our mock trial tournaments (key word being, “most”).  But I can tell you about that time I thought my professor wrote “baller!” on my mid-term essay, but what she actually wrote was “better!”  I can laugh about that time I put waaaay too much cornstarch in my hair to try and look more like Eleanor Roosevelt for my six-page monologue at the State History Day Competition.  And I will always remember those crazy road trips to various mock trial tournaments with jumbo Slurpies and ridiculous poses for team photos. 

That courtroom was a battlefield

Headed to the Night Market in Phnom Penh! 

So I hope my students remember the new friends they met, that time they went to the night market in Phnom Penh, and the awesome library the competition was held in.  And hey, if they remember that they are also both the 2^nd best spellers in their grade division in the nation, then that’s okay too. 

                                                         

Choyi and Raisy having some fancy ice cream!