Meet Vasai

I like being the oldest child in my family because I can try and teach the younger ones how to be better people. Unfortunately, they are still naughty sometimes so I still have work to do! I have four younger brothers and sisters and we live together with my mother and my uncle in a house in a poor area of Phnom Penh. 

The hard thing for me is looking after my baby sister by myself if my mother is working selling fish. My baby sister is so little and I don’t know what she wants when she cries. Is she hungry? Is she in pain? I don’t know. That’s why, when schools closed because of COVID-19, I would often go and do my mother’s job which is selling fish, while my mother would stay home and look after the little ones.

Now that school has re-opened again I haven’t gone back yet. It’s just too hard on my mother. She can’t look after the little ones and work, especially now that she sells less because of COVID-19. She says that the money she earns in the morning is gone by the evening. My mother really wants me to stay in school, but we don’t have many choices right now. I think I have to take a break just while my baby sister grows a little bigger. Just two years.

I really do want to go back to school, though, I know it’s the only way we can change our situation. And I know the NGO SKO will support me to go back. I miss school, I go in for lessons on Saturdays just to try and keep up a little bit. That also takes me away from any stress at home. I plan to be a doctor and cure people and make them stay healthy, so I definitely have to finish my studies. If I succeed, I will change all our lives. I’ll make sure my little brothers and sisters can stay in school and not worry they have to drop out. I’ll help my mother, who works so hard. And maybe I can go abroad to somewhere with a beautiful beach one day, maybe somewhere like France.

If I could change anything in Cambodia it would be to make the economy better. COVID-19 has been so hard. I’d like to see that change.