Battambang Cambodia – Family Improves their Lives by Selling Vegetables – 23 Mar 2015

The YH family live in Preck Chdou village, in Battambang Province, Cambodia. They have five children living in a small wooden cottage. Living in very poor conditions, YH fishes, works as a laborer in a rice farm, and grows vegetables by her home in order to earn a meager salary.

Her husband is a hired hand on another rice farm. He also does a variety of other work to earn an income to support their family. Like many people in his situation, he went to Thailand for a few years to earn a better salary.  He returned recently from Thailand, where he went to work illegally as a laborer on a farm. His hope was to earn enough income to support his family. Unfortunately, his hopes were not realized.  He recalls, “there, in Thailand I was cheated many times by the owner of the farm and by the person who gave me the job, I had to run and hide from police and sometimes had to escape into the forest for a few days without any proper food to eat.”

The YH family are very poor and are living from hand to mouth. Besides working as laborers, they also pick wild morning glory or water lily from ponds or rivers to sell.

Although they don’t earn much, the YH’s are still able to send their children to school. It is their thought that they are poor because they received little education growing up, so they cannot find any jobs besides physical work. They hope that education will help improve the life of their children so that they will not have to face the hardships that they do.

The Healthy Life Reinforcement (HLR) team met YH when they implemented an organic FAITH (Food Always InThe Home) vegetable garden in her neighborhood. She came to the HLR team because she was very interested in the garden, and asked a lot of questions about the project. She was visibly excited upon hearing about HLR’s organic FAITH garden program. Salee, the manager of the HLR team, sat down with the family and discussed the program and had them fill out an application. They were approved immediately and the HLR team helped them implement a garden near their home.

The YH family are working hard in their garden to make it as productive as possible. They plant morning glory, bok choy, long beans, lettuce, tomato and salad. They have harvested their tomatoes and morning glory twice already and are able to eat their salad leaves every day. They sell some of the vegetables to the HLR vegetable shop and some to their neighbors. They sell 10-20 kg for US$10-15 each time they harvest.

YH says that their cost of food has reduced because they are able to eat out of their garden, and the additional income from selling vegetables goes to supporting her children’s studies.

In the dry season in Cambodia, water shortages become an issue, so the HLR team are emphasizing to the YH family the importance of cover cropping and putting mulch in their garden to reduce the amount of water lost to evaporation.  They are also encouraging the family to start to grow their own seeds so that they can always have a seed stock to replant in their garden beds.

The family dream of having a larger farm to cultivate using the practices and techniques they learn from the HLR team.  They would also like to be able to save enough money to start raising pigs and other animals to further increase their income.

The YH family are extremely grateful to the HLR team for helping them start to improve their lives.