By Visarl
A long time ago the people in my village and other places in the Cambodian countryside needed to have an occupation that could support their families. They started to do farming in their farms, a heritage from their ancestors.
The people in my village need to grow crops that are important to other countries and other continents so that they can sell them for a better price than they can sell in Cambodia. The types of crops they grow are rice, corn, bamboo shoot, radish and Winter melon.
In the past, not many people in my village and other places in Cambodia knew how to plant crops in such big amounts. They only knew how to take care of the farm produce that would be enough for their needs. The plants that they grow now are still not so good because they don’t know about how to use insecticide, take care of and harvest their plants, so we need a volunteer organization to come to our village to teach us solutions to our problems.
We are fortunate because our farms are near the Baray Lake so it is easy to take water from it to our crops. But, in 2011 the rainy season brought floods. It became a big problem because farmers in my village and in other places in Cambodia lost most of their crops. Baray Lake overflowed. We had difficulty supporting ourselves. We need to make a solution to stop the Baray Lake from overflowing into our farms in the future.
Visarl,17, lives with his family in Siem Reap Province. He has studied technology and media with the Ponheary Ly Foundation since 2012, and began taking PLF sponsored Global Citizen Media classes in 2011. He wants knowledge about Video and Photography. On Sunday he likes to go to Internet cafe to search the hot news about camera Technology. He uses Wikipedia to learn about the how to uses camera. He wants to be a camera man and show his photographs and videos on the Internet so that he can share important things with the world.
Dear Visarl,
Thank you for your blog entry — wow! These are some very difficult problems: how to get more vegetables and grains from a crop, how to get a better price for crops, and what are the best insectisides! It is important that people understand the problems — so, it is very good that you are spreading the word.
Keep up the good work!
I didn’t know winter melon was grown in Cambodia! We eat it a lot in China, where I am from, especially during the summer. Do Cambodians also eat it?
We have a lot of winter melon in Cambodia.