Battambang, KH – Families strive to overcome Coronavirus and floods – 30 Oct 2020

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Finally, the flooding is over the worst and some areas are starting to dry out. The Healthy Life Garden Shop team is encouraging and assisting families to re-plant their family gardens, in order to renew their home grown food supply. The team is assisting with mentoring and providing compost, seeds and seedlings.

This year has been an awful time for people around the world, as Coronavirus has infected over 49 million and the resulting COVID – 19 has killed over 1 million. While COVID-19 has caused many families severe suffering, some regions have also suffered from other disasters such as war, earthquakes, storms, forest fires and floods. SE Asia is among them because of the severe flooding that has impacted over 5 million people, with thousands of homes flooded and at least 132 people killed by some of the worst flooding in decades to hit Vietnam and Cambodia.

Cambodia, especially Battambang has been seriously flooded for nearly a month now. The families living in the low parts are flooded by deep water that destroys their gardens and any field crops. People are struggling to survive.

Many of the Healthy Life vegetable garden program families are also struggling, as all of them are quite poor and depend on their vegetable garden for food, and laboring in the fields planting rice for income. Healthy Life supported them with rice and other food items when the Coronavirus first arrived. They now face recovering from the flood water that they were unable to hold back, all they could do was sit in their homes, looking at the flood and holding onto their hopes of surviving it. Some of the program’s families have survived by eating vegetables from their gardens that were planted above the water level such as gourd, melon and with the rice that was distributed earlier.