3/27/09

An Accident on National Road No.4

On March 22nd, at around 2pm, a severe accident occurred on the National Road No. 4, only 10 minutes drive from our site.
A sedan-type car was smashed by a big truck. We rushed to the scene with our community ambulance and a command car, but it was already too late, the driver of the sedan was crushed to death. There were no other passengers in the car.





What happened? It seems that the sedan first hit a tanker running in front of it, and that the sedan’s bumper was trapped. The sedan probably then detached itself from the back of the tanker but lost control. It was then smashed by a big truck running fast behind the car.

This is not a unique case. Such tragic accidents are happening all the time on National Road No.4. It would have been even worse if the big truck had hit the tanker, as it would have caused a huge explosion.

This is one of the many tragedies occurring on the roads in Cambodia…

3/4/09

Vegetable Garden for the Health Center

We have started growing vegetables, which will be served at the health center.

In this remote area of Cambodia, people rarely grow vegetables at home. The reason is that either they lack water to grow plants, or they are not aware of the nutritional benefit of vegetables, focusing instead on getting any food to fill their stomach. They mostly eat a lot of rice with a salty fish paste. Since they don’t grow vegetables themselves, they need to buy them at the market, and it is costly. They thus tend to give up eating vegetables.


We grow vegetables not only for the health center meals, but at the same time we want to use our garden as a demonstration farm for the community people. They will see how vegetables are grown, how to take care of them and how they can be cooked.

We are also planning to provide cooking classes for nursing mothers and pregnant women, and to give them a kind of starter package to help them start their own vegetables garden in the near future.

Children malnutrition is a critical problem in this area. We very much anticipate that this kind of programme will contribute to improving the current poor nutritional status of the local people in the long term.





We often obtain seeds from the existing vegetables and fruits. Tomato, paw paw, mango etc.. All grown from the seeds remaining when we eat those things. It works quite well!