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Fish and Morning Glory (Lake Clinic Cambodia)

Tonle Sap lake, an area blessed with natural beauty, provides over 70% of the proteins consumed in Cambodia. When there is less fish, costs increase, and there is domestic violence, alcoholism and more consequences that impact families living on the makeshift floating houses. They struggle to provide food and safety for their children.

Lake Clinic and Global Roots collaborated to pioneer a floating garden technique. Sok’s family built a small vegetable floating garden to help improve nutrition with freshly grown morning glory, and this helps sustain their livelihood with supplemental income from sale of vegetables, allowing the children to go to school. Sok’s condition is not uncommon in a region of extremely hard living conditions compounded by poverty and even sometimes alcoholism, set admist the original beauty of the Tonle Sap lake. Thankfully, the area is rich in fish, bringing proteins and a small source of income for them to buy rice and other necessities. However, each season brings smaller and fewer fish, leaving fewer choices for poorly educated fisherman to survive: they just have to fish more. But now, they can also farm!

Kenyan Schools and Greenhouse Synergies

Mid-way between Nairobi and Mombassa is Mtito Andei, a rural town in Kenya that has been hard hit by both climate change and the AIDS epidemic. The town is popular stop for truck drivers to spend the night. The Global Roots Children’s Garden at Matangini elementary School has convinced impoverished families to send their children back to school, and also funded a greenhouse fitted with an optimal water drip system, making it possible to reduce the water footprint while producing vegetables all year around. Part of the production of vegetables at the school is used to feed HIV positive children before they take heavy doses of AIDS medication. Our Children’s Garden in Mtito Andei is not only convincing parents to send their children back to school, it is also saving lives. Keeping children in school in this part of Kenya is critical because Mtito Andei is a place where unattended boys are forcibly recruited into gangs and unskilled girls forced into a lifetime of sexual slavery.