Thina from Cambodia

Thina was born in 24th February, 2012 in Klaeng Kong village, Sena Reach Otdam commune at Preah Sdach district. Now she is 9 years old and is at grade 3rd of Kamrieng primary school.Thina lives with her grandparents. She has one sister Raksmey and two brothers Raksa and Thivorn. Thina is the 3rd child in the family. The family lives in a narrow and small cottage zinc roof with 8 family members. Thina’s parents are farmer and they moved to work at Phnom Penh as construction worker and chef to support children's study and family livelihood due to their family living condition is so hard and her family also got poverty card from local authority. Thina shared some challenges and difficulties of her life and study. Her family is so poor, so she more often could not live together with her parents at homeland. It means that her parents mostly moved to work at Phnom Penh to support the whole family and she just lives with old grandparents that’s why she lacks of warmness from the parents. Sometime the family could not provide her enough food to eat as other children. For her study she also faced the challenges with traveling to school because her house is far away from the school and every day she spends much time about 30mn to school via riding bicycle with her brother. She always felt unsafe by traveling along way to school as she is a small girl. She added that her family could not support and provide her enough school supplies/materials, uniforms and bicycle and sometime she shared it from her brothers and sister. However, she faced many challenges in her life and study and she still has high commitment to study anytime both at home and school. In the future she would love to be a doctor even though she comes from the poor family. Fortunately, in July, 2021 her family was selected into school development program of Sunshine Cambodia organization by school principal and local authorities due to family difficulty. This program provided her masks, soaps and poster of good hygiene habits and supported her family food pack such as rice, noodles, fish sauce, soy sauce and sugar. All of these supporting were a good assistance to help her study processing, hygiene practice at home and school and livelihood for a while. She also hopes to get more support from the program with bicycle, uniforms and study supplies in the next time that’s why from all of these help and supporting provide her hope to achieve her future job plan as a doctor.