Day 10 (Royston & Evelyn)

DAY 10

Urbanisation just made everyone a little lazier. The huge soft beds were clearly the culprits. The entire balcony were fully utilised: Ledges, clothes line, tie new lines, areas not belonging to our rooms; we used every possible space to accommodate 3 days' worth of washed clothes for a team of 20 people. 

Hot milk from the breakfast menu wasn't the nice warm cup of milk prepared from milk powder, but rather, just condensed milk with hot water. Refreshing enough eh? 

Once again, we took Super Truck back to Croap to finish up the BSF that we've left half done! All of us 'level up' as we are now very much appreciative of the non bumpiness of the sandy roads on the way to Croap.

Upon arrival at CROAP, guess who we met? The NUS medical team! They were leaving to visit the floating village. Can't believe they have been staying at Croap for nearly 10 days while we were enjoying our aircon at our guest house. One of them, an environmental engineering graduate student, Jeremiah, was interested in our BSF project, stayed with us for the rest of the day.

The people at CROAP had prepared an elevated concrete platform behind the kitchen under instruction from father Hernan to stage our 6 BSFs. It provides level ground to support the BSFs. Unfortunately, it wasn't perfectly flat so we had to use sand and bricks under the BSFs as additional support. The patience-testing task took us almost an hour; it was difficult because the platform was rather narrow such that the 6 BSFs had to be put merely 2-3 cm apart from each other, consequently rendering invisible the designs we had drawn on the left and right sides of the BSFs =(.

We thus had had to delay our next activity by 1.5 hours as, finishing the BSFs took more time than expected. Leveling and measuring the gravels and sand levels in the BSFs took some time as we had only one measuring-plus-leveler stick for six BSFs. The BSFs were finished at 1 pm. They worked perfectly well; we could see the difference of the water colour before and after filtration. If somebody had put the filtered water into one of our mineral water bottles, we would probable accept it as potable water.

While waiting for the truck uncle to come, Minghui brought us behind CROAP to see a big pump by a stream which was installed for the villagers by one of the political parties prior to election. The pump has long stopped working due to poor maintenance and the villagers have resorted to manual means of collecting water-- with buckets.

SC Feedback

Mingzhou was not his usual chirpy self today. The prophecy has become true! Yiing Jye stayed back to accompany the non-chirpy boy. The rest of us went to SC after lunch.

The sewing students managed to complete 21 laptop bags; rather amazing considering they had only 3 days to finish all of them and they had never seen or done a laptop bag before!

Joyce, Eunice, Diana, and Denise interviewed Mr. Bong to clarify some doubts that were brought up during the meeting the night before. This included the manufacturing costs of the laptop bags, sales and demand for their products so far, and also to gauge SC’s response towards our idea. Mr. Yla, the head of the whole vocational training programme was there as well.

Feedback session with SC started at 4pm. Our idea on the laptop bags were well received by the SC. Both teams expressed each other's gratitude and thanked each other for being understanding and cooperative during our entire stay. Both sides agreed to pursue future joint projects. SC then invited us to watch a soccer match between the SC students and the state school students the next day.


After we had a photo taken together with SC, Minghui, Diana, Denise, Joyce, Eunice and Evelyn left to discuss the details of the microbusiness plans with Mr. Phalla (in charge of education) and Mr. Yla at the SC office upstairs. Issues brought up included the transport cost if the bags were to be sent to Singapore. Mr. Phlla referred us to an SC volunteer based in Phnom Penh, as sending the goods from the city would be cheaper compared to that from Pursat.

We were glad that SC was receptive to our ideas and was helpful in providing information. They agreed to provide us with necessary otherwise-confidential information regarding the sales of bags and pouches, consisting of inventory and incomes. They also confirmed that 80% of the profit from sales of bags goes to the SC students.

It was indeed a nice full stop to this 10 days YEP journey. However, this is just the beginning of a new chapter, waiting to be filled with even brighter colours and bolder and more creative ideas. We're sure our next project will be a blast.

Wait for us, Pursat, we will be back!