MaD Cambodia

 Hi everyone,

The latest edition of the MaD Chatter is available to download here. 

Happy reading!!

With our projects in Prolit gathering more and more momentum, over the past couple of weeks MaD has taken stock of some new equipment which will be of invaluable use to our rural development work. First off we have our new vehicle: the MaD Tuk Truck. Even before we started work in Prolit we knew that getting to and from the project site each day was going to be a major challenge, especially during the rainy season. However, the road has turned out to be even more difficult to navigate than we had estimated! When we first started work in the dry season we found ourselves having to take half the amount of materials that we needed for the day simply because our motorbike wasn't capable of pulling the trailer stacked with the full amount of materials across the bumpy, sandy and pothole ridden road! Things quickly deteriorated once the rains started coming down and the road is now getting more and more difficult to drive across with each day that passes.

Making a Difference (MaD) for Good USA just won a 2010 NVIDIA High Impact Grant for our water and sanitation project in Prolit village. We will use the $50,000 grant to transform the lives of all 1,048 residents in the village of Prolit in Cambodia, by installing UNICEF water pumps, distributing effective water filters, and building improved sanitation units using compost toilets. Furthermore, we have raised additional funds to provide water pumps and filters to an additional 1,000 people in the villages surrounding Prolit thanks to the following corporate sponsors: Siliconware Precision Industries Co., STATS ChipPac LTd., Nan Ya PCB Corp., ASE Group, and Unimicron. These grants will tremendously impact the lives of many Cambodian people and we sincerely thank the aforementioned corporations and the following volunteers that helped to apply for the grants: Chris Alford, Stephanie Kent, Stephanie Bravo, Grace Lee, Nick Smith, and Ashkon Jafari.

 Over the past few weeks we've been making significant progress with our water and sanitation project in Prolit village. We've now completely finished our first sanitation unit which is in full use and is going down very well. Lots of members of the community have been coming to try it out (they love the fact that you can sit down on it rather than squat!), so the buckets are filling up rather quickly! The families responsible for it have been very proactive in terms of keeping the toilet clean and tidy, the bucket of cover materials filled up and the full waste buckets sealed and stored away properly, which has been very encouraging for us to see. 

Last week we started work on our first sanitation unit in Prolit village which is slowly but surely taking shape. Ecodana helped us to raise the funds for this first compost toilet, so you can read more detailed updates on how the construction is going on their website. We’ve now finished the foundations, laid all of the bricks and finished the floor so all that remains is to build the walls, the roof and install the shower unit and the compost toilet. We also did a bit of agricultural work next to the sanitation unit. The aim is that each unit has a run off area for the waste water/grey water so that it can be used productively to provide irrigation for a small plot of crops. Next to the sanitation unit was a bunch of banana trees, however they were all spaced too close together and so were competing for the limited nutrients in the soil and so none of them had been able to bear fruit. So we cleared the ground, cut down about half of them, chopped them up and then fed them back to the remaining trees as compost. Hopefully now the trees that are left will grow much stronger and will be producing bananas before too long. We’re also hoping that the rest of the community takes notice and starts doing the same for the hundreds of other banana trees in the village that are growing the same way!