Thank you! My life is better

Lian, is a nine year old girl, studying in grade 2, in Viengkham District. While she is quite shy at first, she is actually she very talkative and has a beautiful smile. She speaks a local ethnic language and is learning how to speak the official Lao language.

Lao language is her favorite subject in school because its helps her improve her speaking. “I want to be a teacher in the future because I want to teach children in my village to have more knowledge, a good future, and to be able to speak Lao clearly,” she said.

Lian is a second child of three children in the family. Her parents are rice farmers, but the harvest is not enough to feed the family for the entire year. Like many other rice farmers in their village, her father Chanh and her mother Kham, do not have other work so they have very little money.

Although Lian was enrolled in school, her parents could not afford to buy her a school uniform, school supplies or even pencils and notebooks. Many days they would ask Lian to look after her younger brother or look for firewood.

Her father is not healthy, so her mother is the main labourer in the family. Kham tries to earn extra income by doing daily labour and finding wild bamboo shoots in the forest to sell.

Sometimes, they have to borrow rice from their neighbors, which is also a problem because they often don’t have enough for their families either.

“I don’t want my daughter to study because we cannot support her. I feel so bad that my wife has to work so hard. I cannot help her very much,” Chanh said.

Life Begins to Change

World Vision came to their village and told them about rice banks and asked the villagers to select three people to become the rice bank committee in their village. A Rice Bank is like a regular bank, with rice as the currency. Villagers can borrow the rice when they don't have enough for the family, at a low interest rate.

World Vision staff, together with district agriculture staff, conducted a training about how to manage a rice bank. After successfully completing the course, World Vision provided 3200kg of paddy rice to the village committee.

The committee returned to village with the rice which is available to loan to families. Some families borrow rice seeds to plant and some borrow rice to feed their families. 

Lian’s family was able to borrow paddy rice from the bank.

“Now, I don’t worry so much. If we do not have enough rice, we can borrow from the rice committee. I would like to say thank you to the government and World Vision who supported the rice bank in our village,” says Lian’s father.