I am currently volunteering as an English teacher in Hope Agency school in Cambodia, a school that offers free English education to 350 children from Bakod village and the surrounding areas, in order to improve their prospects in life, as the English language would allow them access to more job opportunities in industries such as tourism.

Cambodia is a less economically developed country, with an average household income of merely $1,100 (US dollars) per year, an amount of money that most of us would expect to earn in just 2 or 3 weeks. However, the area the school is located in is a significantly poorer region in comparison to the capital of Phnom Penh or the highly populated tourist town of Siem Reap.

Not only does the school provide an English education to the children in this area, but also aims to help the families in the village who are the most in need, through the Food Bank Project funded by the volunteers. These families that are most in need have very little food, limited or no access to fresh water, no access to health care, and unimaginable living conditions.

The money raised for the Food Bank enables us to support these individual families by supplying monthly packages containing food and toiletries, financing medication, as well as financing far bigger projects such as purchasing mattresses for them to sleep on and even building new houses.

The lives of these families are simply heartbreaking, so please continue reading to find out their stories, how we have helped so far, and what needs to be done next to continue improving the quality of their lives.

Mr Saat

Mr Saat and his wife are both HIV positive. His wife is also deaf, along with one of their 2 children. Due to his illness, Mr Saat tires very easily and given that he earns his income as a builder, it has become very difficult to earn enough money to supply his family with even the very basic everyday necessities. 3 months ago their water pump broke, and so for the past 3 months Mr Saat has been walking to fetch water for his family from an extremely contaminated source. In a recent visit it was discovered that the part needed to fix their water pump only cost $10!!!! The pump is now in the process of being fixed but it's hard to believe that such a tiny amount of money, something I would spend on a cocktail on a night out, could save this family from polluted water and re-connect them to a safer water supply.

The next things to be done to help this family are to supply them with mattresses as they currently sleep on wooden boards, and to provide a separate bed for the children as all four of them are currently sharing. We would also like to take Mr Saat's wife and son to Phnom Penh to receive hearing tests to see if anything can be done to improve their hearing, and this would cost $80 for transport and just $10 for the test. The children also need to be retested for HIV as although there is talk of them having previous testing, there is no evidence to support this and these children deserve to have a full and happy life.

Lok

Mr Saat's mother, Lok, lives just next door. Her house was falling apart so she sold her rice field in order to build a new house. However without the rice field, she then had no income to support herself. She is now 75 and we think she has Alzheimer's. Her other son and grandsons moved to Phnom Penh to find work, leaving the youngest grandson who is just 5 or 6 to live in her care. They both share the new house that her money bought her, however it is nothing but concrete walls and a roof. The floor is unfinished, and the only substantial possession in the room is the bed that both they share, with the mattress and the pillows we recently bought for them. Lok also complains that she has painful eyes, so we would like to be able to take her to an opticians to see if anything can be done to help her.

Biead

Biead lives with her family and has been paralysed for the past 30 years, since she gave birth to her son. She lies on her side on a wooden table all day, recently equipped with a mattress, just outside the family's house, and she has some movement in her arms and upper body, however it is limited. She has refused to be moved inside as she enjoys watching the children in the village play, as well as managing a wave to us volunteers as we pass by in a tuktuk everyday. We have rebuilt the roof that was sheltering her to improve her living conditions, however the wall at her back does not shelter her fully from the regular rainfall and storms, so our next mission is to rebuild the wall to make her as comfortable as possible.

Norh

Norh's son had a gambling addiction and owed a lot of money to numerous people, so Norh and her husband, being relatively wealthy at the time, bailed him out, leaving them with no money. Shortly after, Norh fell ill and spent a year in hospital, in which time her son sold off parts of their home to pay for her medical care, and by the time Norh came home from hospital, she found that she wasn't coming home at all, as all that remained of her house were the front steps that are still standing today. The Food Bank rebuilt a house for her and her husband, however it's made out of tin and gets extremely hot. Norh also needs medication for her high blood pressure that the Food Bank finance.

Pollet and his wife

The Food Bank has supported Pollet and his wife by building them a new house which is now fully completed and far more liveable than their previous one. The cost of such a house here is only $1800, just one month's wage for most people at home!! Between them they only earn $4 per week, so cannot even afford to feed themselves properly without the Food Bank supplies, let alone build themselves a new house. Pollet's wife also suffers with Tuberculosis (TB) and requires medical attention and medication, which the Food Bank also provides.

Moun

Is an elderly woman who, due to the reign of Pol Pot and the assassination of roughly 3 million Cambodians between 1976 and 1979, never got married or had any children, therefore she has no one to rely on in her later life. She lives in the tiny wooden house that she was born in, and although she receives some help from her neighbours, she would not get by without the food packages and additional support from the Food Bank.

Kandob

Kandob is one of our students at Hope school and lives with her mother. They both work extremely long hours in the rice fields picking cockle shells, earning no more than $2 a day. Kandob has to juggle helping her mum and her studies, meaning she only gets a few hours sleep each night. The Food Bank is currently in the process of building her a new house, however it is still far from completed, and needs furniture to make it a comfortable living environment for them both. Until this is completed they are still living in their old house, a tiny wooden house the mattress and pillows that we previously provided them with.

This week, 2 new families were added to the Food Bank community, and although I have not had the opportunity to meet these people yet, they must be in dire need of support that only we can provide.

So please, if just any one of these stories have touched your heart even slightly, please spare some money and donate to the Food Bank, as a little money can make a huge difference to these families and is literally live changing for them. They deserve so much more than what this world has provided them with. We are so fortunate to have been born in the time that we were and in the location that we were, and it's so difficult to ever imagine living the way that these people do. So please please please donate a little money rather than spending it on that extra drink this weekend that you definitely don't need. Please share so I can raise as much as possible for these wonderful people!!