Report DDSP Cambodia

 DDSP PROJECT REPORT    12 March 2011                                                           

We met with Pheng Samnang, Director and DDSP staff to review the progress of the extended PQR Project, funded in July 2010 for two years. 

DDSP was established in 2003 and the PQR Project (Paraplegic and Quadriplegic Rehabilitation) was set up in 2004. The project was extended to include the District of Veal Veng, which makes up almost 40% of the province but is remote from Pursat Town, in 2010.

DDSP also organise disabled races as part of the Pursat River Run in October or November each year. This event is a real social inclusion occasion for disabled people who compete in wheelchair and leg amputee races. The event is well covered in the media including national press and television.

Samnang was keen to let us meet some of the clients who had benefitted from the PQR project and we spent the best part of one day visiting. Only one of the visits was in Pursat town and we quickly realised that the fact that the clients were spread across the countryside, some in remote villages or hamlets, made the job quite a challenge. Our first visit was to the Rehabilitation Centre in the Provincial Hospital. DDSP supports hospital staff providing food, support and physiotherapy for about twenty children who meet here twice a week. Many of the children were unable to walk and they were being cared for, fed and entertained by their parents and the staff. We then visited Ev George, a man in his sixties who had fallen from a palm tree some 45 years ago and was unable to walk. DDSP had helped him set up a barber’s shop where he usually had three or four customers a day. His wife sold cakes from the shop.

It took an hour to travel to the home of Lia Tep. Twenty minutes out of town we turned down a dusty lane which we followed for another twenty minutes. When the lane narrowed to a footpath we abandoned our 4x4 and walked across the fields to Lia Tep’s house. He had been a woodcutter, but 6 years ago an ox-cart had overturned and crushed him, leaving him paralysed from the waist down. DDSP had found him four years ago and they had set him up as a market gardener/chicken farmer. His house had been adapted and a well built. Recently they had put in a MSAVLC-funded latrine. We subsequently visited clients who had been set up as a cattle farmer, a rush weaver, a chicken farmer and a market gardener. 

Our final visit was to meet Srey Mom and her family. Mom is studying accountancy at the local University. A full account of her rehabilitation is printed in Bulletin 165.