Battambang , KH – Family Receives Loan to Fatten Piglets – 22 Jul 2015

The TY family are living in Ek Phnom District, Battambang Province, Cambodia. They have two school aged children and one toddler. Like many families in the countryside of Cambodia, they do not have a regular paying job and rely on a small plot of land to grow crops for their main income. The TY family are not idle in their attempts to increase the quality for their lives and will do many small jobs to bring in some extra income such as fishing, collecting firewood, laboring on larger farms, and collecting wild vegetables to sell.

The Healthy Life Reinforcement (HLR) garden shop first met the family when they were helping one of their neighbors implement a Food Always In The Home (FAITH) organic vegetable garden. Mr. TY was very shy and sat quietly as the team built raised beds and mixed them with compost. He sat near the garden for three hours asking the shop team questions and listening intently to their answers. Later that day he applied for a garden. When Salee, the manager of the HLR garden shop, went to visit the YT family at their home, it became very clear how much the family needed a consistent source of nutritious food. As a result the shop accepted the family’s application and helped them build a vegetable garden.

The family now works very hard in their garden and it shows, because it is productive and green throughout the year. Mr. TY has become a master of the most fundamental practice in a FAITH garden, relay planting. He understands that he needs to plant different vegetables at different times in order to be able to harvest throughout the year. Even when the weather is hot and water is hard to come by, the family always finds a way to collect enough water for their garden. Their efforts have impressed the HLR team and their neighbors.

The family use most of the vegetable from their garden to eat, but they still have surplus to sell to neighbors who don’t have the land to plant vegetables themselves.

In order to help families increase their earning power, the HLR garden shop provide micro-loans for income generating activities to families that prove themselves hardworking with their garden. The TY family are a family that has received a loan to buy piglets, fatten them up, and sell them to the market. The pigs are growing fat quickly and in September the family plan to sell them. Their biggest priority is to improve their home. They live in small shack with their children and want to replace the roof with the money they earn from selling their pigs.

The family hope that one day they will be able to earn enough income from livestock to send all their children to school and feed them healthy meals every day without having to worry.