Our project in remote areas of Kratie province has been renewed and expanded from 4 to 10 villages. Last week I visited the 6 new villages, meeting with the village chiefs and new project participants. We also made time to visit 2 of the existing villages and was delighted to meet up with Mokrea again.

As I noted in the Intersections article, we always include a visit to Mokrea’s family in our field visits but I personally haven’t been out in some time. Victor and Mok have been the ones regularly checking in on them.

Since our last visit Mokrea has begun speaking and we had a short chat. This is a huge relief to his family who was worried because he was behind on learning. As you may remember, several community members had blamed Mokrea’s mother for him “not being normal” because she “did not take him to the hospital soon enough.” Since then our local partner, the Cambodian Rural Development Team, has had training on disabilities and the slow work of shifting perceptions on disability in the village has begun.

Mokrea joined the meeting of three producer groups in the village. These producer groups are designed to invest farmers in each others success – so they work together instead of competing – through collective buying/selling and also double as village savings groups so they can loan each other resources for farming. Then we walked over to Mokrea’s house to see how his mother’s garden was doing.

Since our last visit our local partner had helped Mokrea’s mom build a greenhouse to protect her vegetables from the extreme heat – like most of Southeast Asia, Cambodia had record breaking heat during this year’s dry season breaking the records set last year – and from insects without using insecticides.

She hasn’t planted in the greenhouse yet but plans to soon now that rainy season has begun. She showed us the drip irrigation system that she’s going to use in the greenhouse. I’ll do a follow-up post on our next visit to the island.