On May 3rd, 2017, Karen, our science teacher sent out a form to deliver an opportunity for eight students to become certified scuba divers and do a three-year long research about the marine life of Cambodia. This opportunity is meant to be as an outside of school program. As soon as I saw the form, I submitted it and became one of the members of the team. The team is called Liger Marine Research Team (LMRT). After forming the team name we wrote a grant to Rolex Explorer, but we didn’t get it. Later, Karen submitted the same grant to Laguntza Foundation and this time we got it. We got the financial support to do our research for three years.
In the meanwhile, when we waited for the result of the grant, we started reading about scuba diving. Once in awhile, we talked about what we read, but more often we came together to do workout and do practice swimming to get ready for diving. Besides getting ready for scuba diving and being in a pool session, we also studied the marine lives and their identification.
Later, on September 28th, 2017, We traveled to Koh Seh and took our pool sessions and the dive test and became certified divers in four days. First, we took a swimming test where we had to trade water for ten minutes and swim for 200 meters. Later, we moved to doing all the pool sessions. Establishing neutral buoyancy was the hardest skill for everyone during the pool session, but after many dives, we got over it. Even though the course was very compact and challenging, I enjoy it a lot, especially feeling very relieved when I found out that I passed the dive test and became a certified diver.
