By Barbara Rosasco | Secretary & Treasurer
A sustained effort....how our Rural Assistance Program has grown over the years.
Late in 1998 we formed a partnership with the then newly established Cambodian NGO, CEDAC, with the aim of improving the lives of peasant farmers and restoring the ecological balance in a targeted area of the countryside through extensive planting of trees. Investigation of the wide variety of problems and challenges facing the farmers in our target area led us, step by step, to broaden our program to include four key initiatives.
In a place where most adults are illiterate, the dangers posed by the potential misuse of chemical pesticides and fertilizers present a unique set of problems. Our program teaches farmers to employ organic farming techniques to increase crop yields, reduce costs and rid their environment of the harmful residues from excessive use of agricultural chemicals.
We supply some of our farmers with locally appropriate vegetable seeds, fruit tree seedlings, small livestock (typically ducklings or a piglet) or fish fingerlings to stock their hand dug ponds. We do this to help them diversify their farming output from what had previously been, for most of them, a reliance on just a one annual crop of rainy season rice. This component of our program is particularily important for the many farmers whose rice fields are too small to produce enough to feed their families.
Over the past 16 years we have drilled and installed approximately 500 water wells to ensure our farmers and their families access to a reliable supply of clean, safe water, especially during the long annual dry season. Those wells allow our farmers to continue working productively on their land even during the dry season whereas in the past, driven by a lack of water, they had typically abandoned their farms during the dry season to seek work in the cities.
Our program encourages AIDS afflicted farmers to meet in mutual support groups and provide AIDS patient support providing money for AIDS afflicted farmers for transportation ( about 45 minutes drive) for farmers to visit medical resources.
Establish tree nursuries to encourage reforestation to restore soil fertility
We supply materials, seeds and instruction to help some of our best farmers establish small tree seedling nurseries. Those farmers then share the seedlings with their neighbors and everyone is strongly encouraged to plant trees around their houses and along their paddy dikes.
Our generous donors have helped us to transform lives and rebuild communities to a degree that we never imagined when our program first started.
Links:
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
