COVID19 Home Gardening for 50 Cambodian Families

COVID-19 has still hit hard to the lives of our local community in Cambodia because many of them have lost their jobs, which caused more families into deep poverty, food crisis and indebtedness.

Thank you so much for your support of our COVID-19 home garden project. With your funds, we can support our local community who impacted by COVID-19 to start their own gardens at home. Through this, the families are able to generate some income for the families and prevent themselves from hunger and malnutrition.

To date, we have supported 268 families so far and our goal is to support 500 families with home gardens, so we are very grateful of your support.

We would like to share with you a story of Soy (given name) who participated in our home garden, so you will gain an understanding of how important of home garden for our villagers during this tough time.

Mrs. Soy has a big family of 12 members included her husband, her five children, her four nephews and nieces, and her elderly mother. It is a big responsible for her and her husband to take care of the big members of the families because not only their own children, but also four nephews and nieces because their parents have passed way.

There are only three members in her family who can work to earn money, herself, her husband and one of her children. Soy’s job is a massager in the village who can earn a little bit of money, her husband is a builder and her son is a waiter. Due to the outbreak of COVID, they have lost a big income. Soy cannot earn income like before, her husband didn’t have job regularly and her son was laid-off and has just got a new job at the local shop as a waiter, which earn little money. Her family is facing a huge financial and food crisis. In order to survive, they had to borrow money from their relatives. Soy and her husband have started to work another business by collecting recycles to sell.

Soy’s family received an emergency food package from HHA in September. After telling her about our home garden program, she was eager to join the program. Soy attended our six-hour training courses at our center on basic gardening skills, hygiene and environment. After training, she received seed, fertilizers and other farming materials to start her garden at home. We can’t wait to see how Soy’s garden progress!

 “I am really happy to join home garden because it will help me to have vegetable to eat and also can earn some income from selling. I am going to grow five types of vegetables, morning glory, cabbage curly, wax gourd, pumpkin and bitter melon. As for training, I really enjoyed because I have gained new knowledge and technique on growing. I never thought that I could grow many vegetables on my land because it is small, but after training I understand that I can grow on the recycle boxes and on the vegetable beds. I would like to say thank you so much to my donor who supported me with this program. It will help my family a lot. I wish them all the best”.

Please help to support this fundraiser with any amount you can, so we can help more villagers to stay resilience.