| By Kong Phano, ADRA Cambodia
In Boeng Bat Kandaol commune, Bakan district of Pursat province, 47-year-old Kai Mary spent two years carrying a burden she told no one about.
Since her husband passed away, she had raised her 19-year-old son alone. Widowhood brought more than loneliness — it brought a health decline she didn’t know how to name or fix. Dizziness. Exhaustion. Frequent illness. High blood pressure. Cold, sticky sweats. A mind that raced with worry even as her body wore down.
Every month brought the same quiet crisis: pay for medicine, or pay for her son’s schooling and food. “I didn’t know how to explain my hardship to anyone,” she recalls. “I kept it to myself. The only solution I ever had was to take more medicine.”
That changed the day a local village health support group invited her to a meeting to learn about ADRA’s work in her community. She joined as a member of the Preventive Actions for Transformative Health (PATH) project — and started showing up: for blood pressure checks, for the project’s 13 health education sessions, for a training on growing a home vegetable garden.
She began putting what she learned into daily practice: changing her diet, exercising, drinking more water, resting properly, and growing her own vegetable garden with guidance from the project team.
“After joining the project, I don’t get sick as often as before. I feel more refreshed,” she says. “I spend less money because I’ve followed the 13 topics from the project. My family doesn’t spend as much time or money going to the health center anymore, and now we have natural vegetables from our own garden to eat.”
For Kai Mary, the significance runs deeper than fewer clinic visits. In her community, non-communicable diseases are common and often lock families into a lifetime of medical spending with little protection against the risk. “Since I changed how I live, my family spends less on long-term treatment. I feel my life has been extended by these new daily habits. I have a stronger, steadier mind, and I’ve gained back time I used to lose to illness.”
She hasn’t kept that knowledge to herself. Kai Mary and her family now share what they learned from ADRA with others in the community — how to eat differently, exercise, stay hydrated, rest enough, and manage stress. “Sharing this doesn’t just help others,” she says. “It helps me remember not to forget to take care of myself, too.”
It is a quiet transformation, built one habit at a time — but for a woman who once hid her hardship rather than speak it aloud, it is nothing short of a new beginning.
The Preventive Actions for Transformative Health (PATH) Project is supported by the Australian Government through the Australian NGO Cooperation Program (ANCP).