Marion Gaborit started a great round-the-world trip to meet female farmers. She wanted to report their everyday life, their work and their living conditions… And to pass down some of their recipes through her blog! Among the women she met, some of them, like Suo, have been granted a microcredit and have been funded on Babyloan.

Suo has been living in Bospot Village, 20 minutes’ walk from Battambang, for many years. She is 58 years old and she has been married since 1986. She has seven children, four sons and three daughters. One of her daughter and her husband work in Siem Reap, four hours by bus, and they charged them to take care of their son. Today, she lives with six of her children and her two grandsons that she raises with her husband.

Suo does not own her fields and she has to rent them to work. For the moment, she worked with her husband and her sister that she has to help. Her sister cannot rent a field so Suo rents a plot for her and lets her cultivate vegetables.

Suo barely has tools, just a spade, watering cans and cows to plough the soil. She works bare hands in her fields, early in the morning until the late afternoon. She works in flip-flops, silently, crouching to prick lettuces out, doubled up to cover the young plants of long dry palm leaves that protect them from sun or tottering when she carries the two big water cans on her tiny shoulders. She sees her husband or her son who often help her. They share a joke, they smile and they go back to work.

When she wants to have a break, she only has to walk 50 meters and she is at home. She lives in a small hut, with a sheet metal roof and four wood pillars that support the improvised structure. The house is entirely open to the outside. Below, there are wood beds, without mattresses, some provisions clung on the ceiling so that animals can’t reach them, only one shelf for the dishware, a television connected somehow to precarious electrical installations, clothes hung up here and there, the clothes hamper where the kitten of the family sleeps, the schoolbag and school books of the children, and a small place a bit more ventilated is the kitchen where everything is cooked using coal. Outside, there are four puppies, hens, a cow and its young calf. And there is also her husband, her grandsons who come and go and gravitate around Suo. A very basic comfort but this is the house of happiness all in all, a simple and relaxed family happiness.

I am very happy about the life I lead: I am very well supported and I don’t think my work is hard. I am very grateful for the land I cultivate which enabled me to change my life and to feed my family and our animals.

Suo mainly cultivates vegetables: Chinese cabbage, pepper, collard greens, potatoes, runner beans, garlic… Suo cultivates them to feed the family but also to sell them. According to the seasons, Suo can earn until 50,000 riels per day (around €9) and only 20,000 riels (around €4) when harvests are bad.

The impact of microcredit on Suo’s life: three years ago, Suo settled on that field. At that time, it was a forest and Suo and her husband have had to deforest the entire plot, to plough the soil in order to plant the first vegetables. Thanks to the microcredit refunded by Babyloanians, Suo purchased the necessary equipment to develop her farming activity. With the first harvests, she managed to financially help her children, to pay school to her grandsons and to keep increasing the yield of her fields. Suo is proud of her work and her goal is to have more lands and to cultivate more vegetables. By the way, Suo thinks of a Khmer proverb that she likes: “Step by step, with patience, you can get what you want”.