[Original by Mariko OMURA, Cambodia Project (May 11, 2021); Translated by J. Tsuchiya/H. Lai]
It has been nearly three months since I updated this page last time. This time I will introduce Ms. Bopper I notified before, who has been working in the project site for many years and has experienced the biggest challenges and changes.
You know Ms. Bopper?
Ms. Bopper shows up in our blog sometimes. She eagerly participated in the JVC’s training sessions because in her family only she can work to make money and she couldn’t leave the village to work. Besides, one day she gained about US$ 130 in a trade of her processed ginger since she has participated in the training for making dry herbs.
She was the first woman who raised hands to apply for a trial in selling herbs to Siem Reap. You can watch the video to see the first shipping here.
Ms. Bopper is processing the turmeric harvested in her vegetable garden. It is used as a basic ingredient of herb tea.
Her vegetable gardens
JVC dug a reservoir in her property in 2016. Since then, she made a lot of efforts to widen her vegetable garden when participating in agricultural training sessions. And in 2020, she made up her mind to be engaged in vegetable gardening on a full scale. With the assistance of JVC, she ameliorated her vegetable garden.
In June 2020, Ms. Bopper prepared soil in her new vegetable garden.
In August, she could harvest leaf vegetables like this many.
November. She planted vegetables according to her plan so that she could always harvest various kinds of vegetables.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, she regularly shipped her lettuce to a restaurant in Siem Reap. Since the restaurant was closed because of the pandemic, she began to sell them in local market.
She doesn’t hesitate to encounter challenges. She has spent numerous time and energy working in this vegetable garden, and it turns great with her inherent vitality. She continued to put what she had learned from the JVC’s agricultural training sessions in practice. Since August 2020, JVC sometimes invited her to give lectures about how to make farmyard compost. The participants could take a look on what Ms. Bopper was doing in her vegetable garden, so the training became popular.
In January 2021, she invited women from other villages around and they shared their experiences. They visited each other’s vegetable gardens and exchanged various information about monthly income, hot-selling vegetables, methods to grow seedlings, etc.
Ms. Bopper (center) instructs participants of the training.
Ms. Bopper invited those who were from a different village and wanted to see what vegetable gardens were like.
They had been exchanging seeds and seedlings as well.
The woman on the right asked Ms. Bopper to marry her son. It would be great if such a thing happened because of JVC!
Riding on a newly bought XXX ever since two decades!
Ms. Bopper had wanted to buy something for a long time, steadily saving money from the sales of vegetables and herbs. It was a bike. She had been using her old bike for more than twenty years. Finally, the day to buy it came in February 2021! I couldn’t make it to go with her together, but she happily went to a market with a staff member and got a long-sought bike.
Bike Commemoration Day!
One day later, I was surprised to find that that bike is a secondhand product coming all the way from Japan! Riding on her hard-won bike, Ms. Bopper goes out to sell her vegetables almost every morning. She says, I’m so happy to be able to buy it with the money I have been saving from my sales. Her smile makes me happy, too.
I was the most excited one: “Wow! It came all the way from Ome, Japan!” It reminds me of the tractor we used when digging a reservoir. It was also from Japan.
Ms. Bopper and her new bike.
The situation of COVID-19 in Cambodia (as of May 4, 2021)
Last time when I updated this blog in February 2021, there were in total less than 500 infected cases with no death records in Cambodia. However, a cluster of infections broke out on February 20, 2021, and the infection has been spreading to reach 16,299 cases with 107 fatalities in two and a half months. In April, a severe lockdown was imposed mainly in the capital city, circumstances of which changed completely. But the good thing is that in our project area of Kampong Kdei, nobody has been tested positive and people live a normal life without lockdown so far.
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