I have brought back presents, memories and lessons from this trip.
I agree with Thaddeus that this trip is an unforgettable one because I experienced helplessness. I remember one of the nights where our teammate got into some condition? Apart from the joke I have created, I felt helpless that night while we are travelling out of the village because I don't know how to help her there. From this incident, it made me relies that we actually have no control in certain things. However, Vihbu's 1 hour non-stop conversation during the trip with the casualty made me realise that there is always ways to help in certain things even when we have no control of it. I have always believed that "when there's a will, there's a way", this incident indeed bring out this point.
The village life made me realise the huge contrast in the facilities in the city and village and also human's adaptability to the surroundings. When I am in the van travelling into the village, I came across many houses where there are pool of water around them. The hut we stayed in also got 1. I kept wondering why every house have 1 pool of water until Ms Wong actually told us that it is the Cass pool. It sounded kind of disgusting initially because we are just resting, eating and playing beside our own waste. We would never ever imagine ourselves to be flooded with waste water around the HDB flats, would we? However, as time passes by, we did not really bother about the Cass pool and some of us even walked through the pool. Thinking back, it's amazing that we lived 16 days beside the 'shit pool' and it's even more amazing that villagers live there for their whole life.
Our life in Singapore is a luxury. Even in camps, we get to eat canned food. However, in the village, it is rather inaccessible for the villagers to buy raw food from the market. Even the nearest supermarket is in Phnom Penh which is a 3 hour ride from the village. Compared to there, we can find provision shops and supermarket at our doorstep. From this, I appericate Singapore even more.
Lastly, I would like to say it's rather hard to type out this post because this trip is hard to be described by words.
Looking forward to seeing all of you again!
While my memories of 7th Nov are still fresh, I shall post about the day :)
We had this chair game as the 1st item for the day. Initially, we met a lot of miscommunication because each of us just started shouting each other's names to go to the seat to prevent Ms Koh from getting the seat. It made us kind of confused, until we actually select a leader. THen the game got a little smoother and managed to play the game a little better. However, we still did not manage to achieve the 1 minute mark. En Quan decided to 'solo' for the last game. It worked out well! At least, its the best timing we got out of all the games played.
Here, I got the meaning that a leader would be good. Furthermore, too many chefs spoil the soup? Haha. I forgot the phase, but I think you all got my meaning ah... haha
We also had some more facilitating by Ms Koh. I think that Service Learning is still a very debatable topic, even when it is socially accepted by us generally. The problems brought up sounds complicated and is indeed complicated.
Photo essay was fun. The pilot test kind of shows how sneaky we must be in order to take a photo. Haha. But I think that the photo essay test brought up a point that we have to consider how close out topic is to the society in order to take insightful pictures.
We went to ACM to see the heritage of Singapore and South East Asia. the Singapore section was not exactly amazing. Did not see much exciting stuff in the exhibit there. Whereas in the SE asia section, it was filled with mysterious items. I wonder if it is because of my knowledge of Singapore, or my lack of knowledge of SEA, I see that Singapore lack of the depth for our culture compared to SEA/ China's rich culture and identity. I hope our own identity would be built up as time pass by.
Yup, thats all for my side. And sorry if I have any broken english in this post.. because I tends to be grammatically incorrect.
