Battambang, KH – Will pig fattening pay for education? – 15 Jul 2015

In Cambodia these days, people living outside of the cities face a daily struggle to feed their families. There is a trend of people moving to borders and to neighboring countries like Thailand and Vietnam to try and find work. Sometimes these migrants are cheated, forced to do work without pay, and some are forced into the sex trade.

Things are not so for VSV and her family. VSV works as a dish washer at a local restaurant in the morning and comes home to tend her garden and take care of her livestock in the afternoon. Her husband is motorbike taxi driver. They live in the Prek Prah Sdach Commune, Battambang, Cambodia and have three school aged children.

The VSV family are extremely hardworking and will do any number of jobs to support their family and their children’s education. VSV says “We live in a poor situation but in a union with our family, our home and our house. Why should we move far away to find work where life is not better at all? We will find a way to live a happy life here through working hard.”

They are members of the Healthy Life Garden shop’s Food Always In The Home (FAITH) organic vegetable garden program and have had great success tending their garden. Mrs VSV uses most of the vegetables she harvest to feed her family and will sell any surplus for some additional income.

She has also become good at fattening pigs and will often engage in a local profit sharing scheme with neighbors and family members. Someone will purchase 2-3 piglets and give them to her to raise. When the piglets are big enough to sell (normally after 5 months), she will sell them and split the profit with the person who supplied the piglets in the beginning. All the costs of feeding and medicine are VSV’s responsibility as well as finding a buyer.

It is her dream to increase the number of pigs that she is raising in order to make even bigger profits. She hopes to be able to pay for her children’s schooling with the money she makes from this business.