Koh Kong - Staff Retreat

So as some of you may know, recently I have been busy planning and organising the staff retreat for BSDA. The staff decided that they wanted to go down to Koh Kong which is on the coast on the Thai border - the furthest point you could go from Kampong Cham!! So a 9 hour bus journey there and back!!
We went for 4 days - 2 traveling and 2 at Koh Kong, one of which we worked - Panha - BSDA Program Manager and all round superstar and I organised a day of SWOT Analysis - for those that don't know - Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats and yep I had to organise this!
We spent the day in the Mangroves where we took over all the pontoons - one for each group to do there SWOT and Panha and I ran around between all the groups facilitating. Then we had presentations and question and answer sections for all the groups - the groups were split into the different projects in BSDA - Livelihood, Social Accountability, Education, Vocational training, Finance and Admin/HR/IT. I have to say the staff did really well and we had some good points raised that we now have to try and work on.
But enough about work, we also had a lot of playing as well. The 9 hour journeys on the bus were full and I mean full (only about 1 hour of downtime) of singing - karoke, dancing (yes on the bus), presentations, games and chanting.....well we are an NGO set up by Monks - so this is expected.
Anyway I set the staff a digital scavenger hunt - gave them a list of silly things, actions etc to take pictures of throughout the trip - also very good to see how people work in teams. So majority of these pictures are something to do with this hunt - for example it is not customary for us all to go round out here hugging trees!!

Sunset over the Mangroves

Sinon, our lovely Sewing teacher making some sugar cane juice.

Sleeping Monks - Ven. Sok Vannra and Ven. Cham Pholla.

Some of the Health team during the SWOT Analysis - Koemva, Pheara & Heng

Lunch in the Mangroves was all seafood - squid, crab and prawns - yummy

Panha(in black) - Program Manager & Vandong - in my glasses - the 2 leading men at BSDA!!

It was just all too much for our ED at one point - loving his macpro is never far away from him....

It was just all too much for our FD Channy!

Our SWOT Analysis presentation.

We learnt that Vatey doesn't really like crabs that are still alive.

Vandong and Panha

The Finance team sorting out there presentation.

Monks at work...

The lovely Sokhoeun who is PC for the MKK project and use to be a Monk and was one of the founding members of BSDA.

Me and Nary  - the new Smile Kids Village Manager - she has so many stories of her life which has been pretty hard as you can imagine in Cambodia.

All of us in no-mans land between Cambodia and Thailand.

Me and Jackfruit

Love this pic of Heng

We also went out to a sandbank of the coast where we all went swimming - fully clothed - Khmer stylie..

The Mangroves of Koh Kong

Our great bus driver who looked after us on the journey and took us everywhere we wanted to go.

We also played hard in the evening and went to a few 'night clubs' with the staff - not the Monks..

Vath Virak showing us some of his saturday night fever moves...

The monk with his monkey - Ven. Prom Dy

We took a boat trip aswell - started off as 40 to a boat but realised that we needed another boat as there were only a few of us that could actually swim and the boat was not that stable!!

  
 And here is the whole team that went on the staff retreat - in the T-shirts that I got printed up for them all - BSDA family in all it's glory.