COVID19 Home Gardening for 50 Cambodian Families

In 2020, we supported 168 vulnerable families with home garden through providing them hands-on training, support and providing them seeds, fertilizer, and farming resources to start their own gardens. As a result, 100% of them have improved knowledge on basic gardening skills, and increased food production and income for the families during the challenging times of the pandemic. This is a nice project to support people who willing to help themselves. This year, 2021, we aim to support 400 families with home gardens, so please help us to help our local community to ensure their food security during this pandemic.

We would like to share with you a nice story of one of the families who participated in our program.

Bopha* has four members in her family, her husband, and her two small children. Living in a rural area, Bopha works as a housewife and takes care of her children. Her husband is a carpenter. Due to COVID-19, her husband can just earn little money, so her family is in trouble.

Working with the village chief, we found Bopha to participate in our home garden program. Bopha just grew some kind of herbs on the bottles before, but never grow many types of vegetables. When we told her about our program, she was very happy and eager to join the program with the expectation that she can have food to eat and also can help her husband to earn money to support the family.

Bopha joined our home garden training courses at our center and received seed, fertilizers, and other farming materials to start her gardens. After receiving the resources, Bopha didn't wait, she started her garden work at her home immediately with the support from our staff. The first job was to make the compost fertilizer using the knowledge she learned from the training. Then followed by land preparing, vegetable beds preparing, and seed planting. She grew many types of vegetables and herbs, everywhere on her small land, on the ground, on the vegetable beds, in the bags, and on the bottles. With her great skill and the support from our staff, her gardens had been growing healthy.

A few months later, she could harvest them for her daily cook with good nutritious meals and also earned some money from the sales. Bopha is very happy that she could join our home garden program and said, she will continue to grow vegetables at home because it is good for the family.

Here is a short video of her garden.

*Name was changed for privacy purposes.

Please join us to empower our local community through home gardening!

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.