Orn of all Trades
A year ago Saturday was race day.
Today, Saturdays look a little bit different.
Since the beginning of the academic year in October, at TGC we've spent our Saturdays working on some really cool environmental initiatives!
Orn, who is the head of maintenance at TGC, has spearheaded these projects. Orn is the kind of guy who doesn't take his job description too seriously. While his job title is listed as "maintenance technician" on the TGC website he does soooo much more than that. It's not unusual to find him organizing huge projects or even serving meals to customers at Joe-to-Go, the coffee shop in Siem Reap run by TGC. The guy pretty much does it all.
Apart from his incredibly calm demeanour and the high-pitch sound effects that he sporadically makes to narrate the days activities, there are two really interesting things about Orn: (1) he can take any material and turn it into something useful and (2) somehow he always seems to land on his feet.
When Isabelle and I first arrived in Siem Reap he was working on a project that involved hanging up water bottles that would be used as plant-holders on the wall outside. The "plant-holders" were arranged to spell out T-G-C. The project took a couple of Saturdays to complete and Iz and I would joke around during those weeks that it looked like we were hanging up trash on the school wall. We would spend our Saturdays teasing the kids that the letters weren't straight or symmetrical and Orn would give them a nice whack on the arm and tell them to fix it. Over several weeks, after instructing the kids to bring in flowers and plants from home to plant in the water bottles, Orn's vision came to life. The flowers blossomed and sprouted out from the water bottles so decoratively that soon you couldn't even tell that this entire fixture was made out of trash. Now, when we have visitors at TGC they often comment on how beautiful the wall looks. One time, mistaking our school for a hotel, a tourist even came in for a 15-minute photo-shoot in front of the wall (sooo weird, but maybe a testament to the professionalism of Orn's work).
After that, we learned to trust Orn with his big ideas. We hopped on board and the next couple of months we were along for the ride as Orn continued to surprise us with his creativity and resourcefulness.
The first few months of November we spent making more plastic water bottle plant holders. This time, we strung them together with recycled wire and hung them up on the wall beside Orn's original masterpiece.
Another project Orn has initiated in the past couple of months is a lattice of recycled wire that covers the TGC bike area. Orn wrapped one of the plants from the garden around the wire and by July the whole thing will be covered in greens, protecting everyone's bikes when it rains. We also started to make wooden frames out of old scraps of wood and Luke had the idea of painting directly on the frame to make a picture station for the kids!
Next, we got to see Orn's ~artsy~ side as he focused on using recycled materials to create art fixtures to hang up on the walls inside of TGC. One project was a picture of Angkor Wat made completely out of plastic straws recycled from Joe-to-Go. We spent hours folding the straws into little flowers and then gluing them down on a sketch of the famous Siem Reap temple.
Pretty cool stuff, right? It gets better...
A couple of months ago, we had 30 minutes left of Saturday class with the Grade 5 students and they were starting to get a little bit restless. Recognizing their impatience, Orn handed me an old recycled rice bag, "here, try making something out of this." How on earth was I going to take an old rice bag and entertain 11 kids who barely speak any English for a half hour? Trying to think on my feet, I quickly grabbed some paint from the art closet, poured some of it directly on to my hand and planted my hand on to the rice bag. The kids were ecstatic! Within seconds they were all messily pouring paint on to their hands and sticking them on to the rice bag. This is what we ended up with:
Not bad for a half-hour project!
The next Saturday, Orn leveled up. Going off of my idea of painting directly on to the rice bags, Orn turned our Saturday library class into a full-on rice bag painting workshop. The kids painted some really incredible things: the Buddhist flag, the Cambodia flag and the TGC logo! At the end, you couldn't even tell that the paintings were done on old rice bags.
When the rice bag paintings were complete, of course Orn had to go even bigger. The following Sunday, when he arrived at school, Orn asked me to go print out "some skeletons of animals." When I inquired about what kind of animal he was looking for he responded in his usual carefree, soft-spoken tone, "ooooh, any animal will do." Confused but trusting of Orn's operation, I printed out a human skeleton and a dog skeleton. We spent the next couple of Saturdays replicating the skeleton print-outs onto the rice bags! We even made a microscope diagram with labeled parts, all of which are now hanging up in the science room.
So now that the whole school was decorated in rice bags, I started thinking about what else we could make out of them. I remembered last year Hal mentioned that his sister Leni, who owns an arts and creative engineering centre in Western Mass, could offer us some ideas to bring to TGC. Leni and her husband Mike actually came to our Social Entrepreneurship class last spring and talked about their Bagshare Project, a program they started to encourage communities to collect recycled materials and turn them into reusable shopping bags.
I spent that Friday night surfing Leni's Bagshare Project website and within about 3 minutes I realized that we had approximately none of the materials that were needed to make the bags the way that Leni and Mike do in their workshop. But we did have tape, a stapler, a hole-punch and a glue gun!!! So I resolved to spend my night stapling, gluing and punching holes into a rice bag until it started to resemble a reusable shopping bag. I used a chair instead of Leni and Mike's "pusher" device in order to fold the bag into the right shape and then glue-gunned the whole thing together. I unlaced some shoelaces from an old pair of running shoes and tied them around the bag to create two handles. Realistically, my bag probably couldn't even hold a good sized mango. But it definitely was a start.
The next morning I introduced the idea to the kids by showing them how you could fold the bag over a chair. In the next two hours, the older kids completely took over the project and made two bags that were 1000x better than my original one. The little kids came out from their computer class and painted the bags and we called it a day!
If you've read Luke's most recent blog post (https://lm-tgc.blogspot.com/2019/03/closing-joe-to-go.html) you know that with Joe-to-Go closing we are looking for a new revenue stream for TGC that can be independent from donor support. Dara and I have been talking about the possibility of continuing to make these bags and potentially selling them back in the U.S. in order to raise money for TGC. While this was just a quick Saturday project for my Fellowship, I'm hoping to send the next Fellows over with a pusher and a grommet to speed up the bag-making process.
So Saturday isn't exactly race day anymore but being able to spend my Saturdays spitballing ideas for new environmental projects with Orn has been one of the highlights of my time at TGC.
To learn more about Leni and Mike's The Bagshare Program check out this link:
http://www.thebagshare.org
Thank you Hal, Leni and of course Orn for all of your support on these projects!
-Emma
Today, Saturdays look a little bit different.
Since the beginning of the academic year in October, at TGC we've spent our Saturdays working on some really cool environmental initiatives!
Orn, who is the head of maintenance at TGC, has spearheaded these projects. Orn is the kind of guy who doesn't take his job description too seriously. While his job title is listed as "maintenance technician" on the TGC website he does soooo much more than that. It's not unusual to find him organizing huge projects or even serving meals to customers at Joe-to-Go, the coffee shop in Siem Reap run by TGC. The guy pretty much does it all.
Apart from his incredibly calm demeanour and the high-pitch sound effects that he sporadically makes to narrate the days activities, there are two really interesting things about Orn: (1) he can take any material and turn it into something useful and (2) somehow he always seems to land on his feet.
When Isabelle and I first arrived in Siem Reap he was working on a project that involved hanging up water bottles that would be used as plant-holders on the wall outside. The "plant-holders" were arranged to spell out T-G-C. The project took a couple of Saturdays to complete and Iz and I would joke around during those weeks that it looked like we were hanging up trash on the school wall. We would spend our Saturdays teasing the kids that the letters weren't straight or symmetrical and Orn would give them a nice whack on the arm and tell them to fix it. Over several weeks, after instructing the kids to bring in flowers and plants from home to plant in the water bottles, Orn's vision came to life. The flowers blossomed and sprouted out from the water bottles so decoratively that soon you couldn't even tell that this entire fixture was made out of trash. Now, when we have visitors at TGC they often comment on how beautiful the wall looks. One time, mistaking our school for a hotel, a tourist even came in for a 15-minute photo-shoot in front of the wall (sooo weird, but maybe a testament to the professionalism of Orn's work).
After that, we learned to trust Orn with his big ideas. We hopped on board and the next couple of months we were along for the ride as Orn continued to surprise us with his creativity and resourcefulness.
The first few months of November we spent making more plastic water bottle plant holders. This time, we strung them together with recycled wire and hung them up on the wall beside Orn's original masterpiece.
Next, we got to see Orn's ~artsy~ side as he focused on using recycled materials to create art fixtures to hang up on the walls inside of TGC. One project was a picture of Angkor Wat made completely out of plastic straws recycled from Joe-to-Go. We spent hours folding the straws into little flowers and then gluing them down on a sketch of the famous Siem Reap temple.
Pretty cool stuff, right? It gets better...
A couple of months ago, we had 30 minutes left of Saturday class with the Grade 5 students and they were starting to get a little bit restless. Recognizing their impatience, Orn handed me an old recycled rice bag, "here, try making something out of this." How on earth was I going to take an old rice bag and entertain 11 kids who barely speak any English for a half hour? Trying to think on my feet, I quickly grabbed some paint from the art closet, poured some of it directly on to my hand and planted my hand on to the rice bag. The kids were ecstatic! Within seconds they were all messily pouring paint on to their hands and sticking them on to the rice bag. This is what we ended up with:
Not bad for a half-hour project!
The next Saturday, Orn leveled up. Going off of my idea of painting directly on to the rice bags, Orn turned our Saturday library class into a full-on rice bag painting workshop. The kids painted some really incredible things: the Buddhist flag, the Cambodia flag and the TGC logo! At the end, you couldn't even tell that the paintings were done on old rice bags.
When the rice bag paintings were complete, of course Orn had to go even bigger. The following Sunday, when he arrived at school, Orn asked me to go print out "some skeletons of animals." When I inquired about what kind of animal he was looking for he responded in his usual carefree, soft-spoken tone, "ooooh, any animal will do." Confused but trusting of Orn's operation, I printed out a human skeleton and a dog skeleton. We spent the next couple of Saturdays replicating the skeleton print-outs onto the rice bags! We even made a microscope diagram with labeled parts, all of which are now hanging up in the science room.
I spent that Friday night surfing Leni's Bagshare Project website and within about 3 minutes I realized that we had approximately none of the materials that were needed to make the bags the way that Leni and Mike do in their workshop. But we did have tape, a stapler, a hole-punch and a glue gun!!! So I resolved to spend my night stapling, gluing and punching holes into a rice bag until it started to resemble a reusable shopping bag. I used a chair instead of Leni and Mike's "pusher" device in order to fold the bag into the right shape and then glue-gunned the whole thing together. I unlaced some shoelaces from an old pair of running shoes and tied them around the bag to create two handles. Realistically, my bag probably couldn't even hold a good sized mango. But it definitely was a start.
The next morning I introduced the idea to the kids by showing them how you could fold the bag over a chair. In the next two hours, the older kids completely took over the project and made two bags that were 1000x better than my original one. The little kids came out from their computer class and painted the bags and we called it a day!
If you've read Luke's most recent blog post (https://lm-tgc.blogspot.com/2019/03/closing-joe-to-go.html) you know that with Joe-to-Go closing we are looking for a new revenue stream for TGC that can be independent from donor support. Dara and I have been talking about the possibility of continuing to make these bags and potentially selling them back in the U.S. in order to raise money for TGC. While this was just a quick Saturday project for my Fellowship, I'm hoping to send the next Fellows over with a pusher and a grommet to speed up the bag-making process.
So Saturday isn't exactly race day anymore but being able to spend my Saturdays spitballing ideas for new environmental projects with Orn has been one of the highlights of my time at TGC.
To learn more about Leni and Mike's The Bagshare Program check out this link:
http://www.thebagshare.org
Thank you Hal, Leni and of course Orn for all of your support on these projects!
-Emma
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