Cambodia

A Hawaii club is helping an impoverished Cambodian village draw water from parched earth as well as hope for a new cottage industry

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PART ONE | PART TWO: LOOMING SOLUTIONS

Editor's note: Star-Bulletin reporter Allison Schaefers recently went to Cambodia on a journalism fellowship sponsored by the East-West Center and United Nations Development Program.

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia » Several times a year, drought forces Eoun Mom, 21, to leave her home at the base of the mountains in the Kampong Speu province and travel two hours down dirt roads into Cambodia's capital city Phnom Penh to earn money in a garment factory.

Traveling so far from home, where most families rely on subsistence farming for food, to work 48-hour plus weeks for less than $100 a month is a sacrifice for Mom, a divorcee and single mother. But it's a necessity in Mom's community, where the people are so poor that they must beg food and water from their community monk rather than offer him support as is the tradition in Buddhist culture. It's a place where oxen starve and babies go naked.

"I don't like working in the factory, but at least it puts food on the table," said Mom, who shares a cheap rented room with co-workers while employed at her job. In the city, Mom works as a fabric inspector from 4 p.m. to 11 p.m. at least six days a week -- but recent rains have brought her home to help farm the rice fields.

WHILE ABOUT 75 PERCENT of Cambodia's labor force relies on agriculture to make ends meet, drought has dried up any hope for those living in Kampong Speu that farming can support them year-round.

Yet hope of a different sort is taking root in the village -- hope nourished by an international project sponsored by the West Pearl Harbor Rotary Club on Oahu.

Currently, many village women have no choice but to find work in Phnom Penh. At least 50 percent of the 300,000 women who work in the city's 284 garment factories are from the rural countryside, said Van Sou Ieng, chairman of the Garment Manufacturers Association in Cambodia.

"We rely on these rural women to provide the bulk of our work force," Ieng said.

This means many young single women, widows and mothers like Mom, who have been raised in villages where silence is still prized in women, are increasingly braving the big city to work in garment factories.

There, they face many challenges, including living with inadequate resources, falling victim to sex predators who rob them of their dignity and gangsters that rob them of their wages. Often when they come home they are shunned by their communities, who view them as "bad girls" who have gone to the city to have sex.

STILL, MOM FINDS garment factory work, with its union wages and regulated working conditions, favorable to the other limited moneymaking options available to her, such as entering the lucrative sex trades or collecting snails, shellfish, firewood and plants for sale and consumption. Mom's garment job allows her to visit home only once a month, but she said that she's lucky to have work. More than half of Cambodia's population is under 20 years old, and jobs are scarce.

But a project sponsored by the West Pearl Harbor Rotary Club on Oahu is helping to improve conditions in Mom's community on two important fronts -- one of which could soon enable her to stay in her village year-round.

One facet of the project began three years ago: Digging wells to support subsistence farming. During droughts these wells -- six, with more on the way -- are the community's only source of water.

Access to clean water and basic sanitation is vital to human development and essential for creating a stable economy, said Douglas Gardner, the United Nations resident coordinator in Cam- bodia.

"Water and sanitation is something of an orphan on the development front -- both in terms of investment and who is responsible," Gardner said. "In a situation where only 38 percent of the population has access to safe drinking water and 22 percent to latrines, it impacts the lives of Cambodian citizens, notably children."

BUT THE West Pearl Harbor Rotary project is also breaking some new ground. It has begun raising money to teach village women how to weave silk into marketable products, said Mark Silliman, director of international programs for Waikele-based club.

"With barely enough water to subsist, traditional backyard agriculture no longer yields enough produce to enable a community to survive," Silliman said. "The loom project hopefully will teach an industry to a new group of young ladies that will give them an honorable way to live."

Following the cottage-industry approach of Mahatma Gandhi, Rotary will hire an instructor to teach the poor how to weave silk, Silliman said. After mastering the craft, the trained will then train future generations, he said.

Master Sgt. Sarun Sar, a Hawaii-based war hero who is on special assignment to the U.S. Embassy in his native Cambodia, recently made the winding trek from Phnom Penh to his birthplace Kampong Speu to help deliver the latest $1,750 installment from the club. A loom can be purchased for $150.

Sar, an Army Special Forces soldier who lost most of his family to the Khmer Rouge, left Cambodia in 1980 with his sister to seek a better life in the United States. One of only 37 soldiers to have been awarded a Silver Star for valor since the U.S. entered Afghanistan in October 2001, Sar said he couldn't have succeeded without an education and skills and wants the people of his birthplace to have the same chance.

"There's nothing left for me in Kampong Speu except my childhood memories. When I was growing up this place was much better, I think," Sar said. "I want to do anything that I can to help these people. Most of them still know my family."

In a temple built on land once strewn with land mines, Sar delivered the Rotary donation earlier this month to Louk Ta Sau Veang, the province's head monk. Also known as the "Monk with Long Hair," he is viewed as something of a Robin Hood by local villagers.

A MONK who became a guerrilla fighter and later married during the Khmer Rouge regime, when religion was outlawed, Louk Ta Sau Veang returned to his religious roots when the fighting was done, putting aside his family and making a pilgrimage into the forest. When he emerged from the woods, his hair had grown long and he had grown skinny -- but his reputation as an invincible source of strength for his people loomed large.

"All of the people of Cambodia are special to me, but I choose to live among the poorest of them," he said from the shelter of his rough-hewn temple in the middle of the woods where he lives with his pet Gibbon, Ameing.

"There is not enough land for farming here and there is not enough water," he said. "During the dry season, people have to live off cut bamboo shoots and wood and they have to walk more than 2 to 3 kilometers to get water."

That is where the loom-school project comes in. Because a majority of households in Kampong Speu are headed by women, a loom school has the potential to teach sustainable skills.

NATIONWIDE, ABOUT 24 percent of Cambodian households are headed by women, said Kantha Phavi Ing, the Minister of Women's Affairs. However, Kampong Speu has an even higher percentage of female-headed households because armed conflict there lasted into the 1990s, said Suosdey Sas, a monk from the Supreme Cabinet in Phnom Penh, who helps protect the impoverished region.

"Widows will be the highest priority for the loom school," said Sousdey Sas, whose name means "hello" in Khmer. "You've heard the saying, that instead of giving a man a fish, you must teach him how to fish. That's what we want to do."

Little has changed in Kampong Speu since the conflict ended in 1997: The people are still farming and they are still poor, he said.

"This new generation is worse off. They are born poor and the children can't go to school at all," Sas said. "Some of the women push themselves to go to the garment factories. Right now, that's all that's out there for them."

A loom school for Kampong Speu would provide life support for the development of small and micro enterprises, which have been deemed of critical importance to women by Cambodia's Ministry of Women's Affairs.

"Eighty percent of our population is living in rural areas, so micro finance will play a crucial role for women into the future," Ing said. "It is a government priority to develop more micro and small enterprises and to ease access to capital for these businesses, especially those headed by women."

THE RURAL LABOR market in Cambodia is fragile, and when local demand for labor is low, migration to the cities is the only option for the unemployed, she said.

The impacts of poverty are greater on rural women, who are an average of four times poorer than men and twice as likely not to complete even an elementary education, Ing said.

"In Cambodia, many believe that women are born to be married to the ideal man and women are still not seen as capable breadwinners," she said. "As a woman myself, I would like to see more women get jobs at a high level, but we are starting from scratch."

Though Cambodia needs to create more high level job and business ownership opportunities for women, garment factory jobs have provided the first way for women to achieve economic independence, Ing said.

"Those 300,000 or so women are feeding more than 1 million people living in rural areas," she said.

Louk Ta Sau Veang hasn't told Mom about the loom school project, which is set to open in the next several months. Such an opportunity is still beyond Mom's dreams, but she yearns for something like it.

"If there were any way for me to stay here, I would," she said as she gazed at her child standing beside her.

Just behind Mom, a hungry ox squishes through the mud, looking for a blade of grass.