Battambang, KH – Garden helps large family – 17 Nov 2014

SOU with Phea, Lai and her children.

A huge challenge for the poorest families in Cambodia is that they tend to have the most children. There are a number of reasons for this. Impoverished families have to focus on urgent needs like food. This focus clouds the opportunity to think about longer term considerations like the spacing of births, and the feeding, housing, and educating of many children. On top of this, there is limited family planning education available to poor families.

SOU and her husband are an example of a poor but large family. She is only 33 years old and her husband is 39, but they have seven children with five in school. They survive by picking naturally growing vegetables from the lakes, ponds and river to sell for a very small amount of money. Her husband sometimes goes fishing, and sometimes works as a rice field laborer. They will do any type of work from morning to night just to feed the stomachs of their family. They find food one day and eat it the next day.

Despite this extreme hardship, they are still encouraging their children to go to school.  SOU mourns that they are poor because they don’t have knowledge, so they must try very hard to encourage their children to learn.

SOU came to meet the garden shop team when they were building a Food Always In The Home (FAITH) vegetable garden for a family, and she was picking morning glory in the river nearby. She came to ask about what the team were doing and how to make vegetables grow well. She seemed very interested and asked for help building a garden.

The shop manager, Salee, visited SOU and believed in her interest in building a sustainable garden that would help feed and support her family, so he submitted an application to Better Lives for support. The application was accepted and Phea and Lai of the shop team helped her build her garden.

She has worked very hard and made her garden gloriously green and productive. She seems very happy with her garden, and has harvested morning glory, salad lettuce, long bean, Chinese cabbages and gourd. She is feeding her family better than before and can also earn from $5 to $10 each time she sells these vegetables in the market. She uses the money she earns to fund her family’s living costs and her children’s education. The shop team feel very happy when they visit her garden for mentoring and see her big smile.

SOU is so very pleased and very grateful to everyone who made the vegetable garden possible, because it is really helping her family.