... to have a real, face-to-face introduction to the life-changing-ness of access to clean water!
HOPE met this family just a few short years ago... when just mere survival was a struggle. They live in the "higher lands" of Cambodia, where they can't really grow rice (which needs to be on lower land, where at least a couple inches of water can sit in the field), even in the wet season. There was no 'life'... just survival.
But then, in 2006, HOPE was able to build a well for this family!
Life has been incredibly, incredibly different for this family since they got their well. As the family shared with us with big, vibrant smiles of how life has changed... there was a moment where our whole team just stopped… and kind of took in the magnitude of it all.
A video of us, wide-eyed at the scene, would have caught the moment so perfectly well:
Kat: So… in four years, this family has gone from having absolutely nothing, having only enough rice to fill their stomachs for four months of the year… to having clean water, health, water to irrigate their crops, now a garden full of vegetables, and is making US$9 - $20 every other day selling their crops to the market? That’s pretty…
Adam: O-jaa!! ... which is one of the few Khmer words we’ve all learned, which means awesome!!
And awesomely o-jaa it is! This family has now been able to grow beans, cucumbers, watermelon, fruit trees, all kinds of veggies! And, fun for us - we got to join them for some planting that morning…
which will yield a harvest full of long green beans in just 2 months! :)
Hopefully anyways, if we did it right! We were joking about how the beans, when they are ripe, would get a better price at the market because they were barang-planted. Ly (HOPE Cambodia's director): "Yah, they could market them as miracle beans - it'd be a miracle that they grew!!" Haha.. well thanks to the family for trusting us with their bean field... fingers crossed we did them more help than harm! :)
As one of my UNION team said that day, “It’s amazing how one well transforms lives .. And we get to be a part of it tomorrow. Cambodians are filling my heart with love .. One smile at a time!” (I stole this off his Facebook, because this, among the other status's that they’ve been putting up, made ME smile so much, every time I took a peek on my news feed when we get a chance to catch some internet time… I hope he won’t mind). :)
O-jaa!
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