In March, MCC Cambodia partnered with 11 local churches to provide food relief to 150 poor households (approximately 600 people) as our first COVID-19 specific project. The primary goal of this small scale initiative was to provide these households with enough nonperishable food to enable them to shelter safely in place during a three week COVID-19 related lock down.

“Most [poor community members] are farmers and workers. During this COVID-19, they are locked down at home. Problems: can’t go to work, lack of income. Needs: rice, meat, medications. There will be worse if COVID-19 continue to spread out and the lockdown still continue.”

Borin Touch, Pastor at Capernaum Church

COVID-19 has disrupted the livelihoods of many Cambodian laborers, leaving them unemployed just as border closures and hoarding have caused food shortages and dramatic price increases.

MCC personnel locally procured and packaged the food relief, following COVID-19 prevention best practices. One of our YAMEN participants, Jonathan from Kenya, has a business background and is partnered with Rajana – a fair trade organization affiliated with Ten Thousand Villages. He researched best practices for disinfecting food packages and developed a workflow for packaging that ensured no accidental transmission of COVID-19. Jonathan took care to also prevent disinfectant chemicals from leeching into the food.

Our Accountant and Partner Auditor, Ringsey, pickled 10 kilograms of vegetables to include in the packages.

We distributed the food relief packages to church leaders and trained them on COVID-19 prevention. Our Connecting Peoples Coordinator, Sokea, delivered the packages in Phnom Penh. I delivered the packages to the rural churches with our Education Coordinator, Chhourn Maly.

The church leaders then distributed the food relief following the COVID-19 sensitive using one of two methods.

• Scheduled Pick-up: Families with transportation signed up for slots on a scattered schedule to pick up the food relief at a local church.
• Individual Delivery: A church leader visited homes individually, following COVID-19 prevention guidelines, to deliver the food relief.

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We took our learnings from this initial distribution – such as the packaging workflow and the need for language independent guidelines – to our partners and the local NGO network as they planned COVID-19 responses.

I apologize that it took so long to get this post up. All COVID-19 project photos are under a content sensitivity review. This only took a week but we then found ourselves very busy with the second phase of response and modifying projects.