Pim is KHT’s Monitoring and Evaluation Officer and travels to our villages to complete baselines, endlines and other vital work that helps us improve how we work. You can read about her journey to the remote village of Ban Eh Vee Jo, below:
As KHT’s Monitoring and Evaluation Officer, I travel to nearly all our village locations to interview beneficiaries, support water testing, support volunteers and also help out sometimes during constructions.
Some villages are fairly quick journeys via well paved roads, others take longer over dirt roads and streams and some are many hours away via bumpy roads, on hillsides and across large rivers.
Ban Eh Vee Jo is one of the farthest villages I have visited and the KHT team went to Ban Eh Vee Jo to complete water testing one month after we finished constructing our WASH system.
We left Khun Yuam on 16 August at 06:00AM and as it is currently the rainy season, it was a difficult journey for the team. On the way to Ban Eh Vee Jo we saw the impact of many landslides, some of which were quite severe. We had to stop the car and wait for them to be cleared and this is often done by the people local in that area and not cleared by government officials, so it takes time and can be dangerous.
We had to park the car a little way away from the village and then walk 3 kilometres. This was because the road was so terrible, and not made of concrete that a car could drive over. The journey was exhausting but also fun. We saw many nice views on the way particularly because it’s the rainy season and all the rice paddies have grown green and lush. Although I was tired, it was work the effort, especially as we were going back to a village we had helped!
Behind the beauty of Ban Eh Vee Jo, I see the issues and just how difficult lives people must live in this area. Roads that are not easy to travel, which isolates the village and people lose opportunities in many ways. Especially in the rainy times, if an illness occurs, having to travel to the hospital is very difficult and takes a long time. The children who study in another village can’t come back home in the evenings when the road is flooded to be with their families.
As the M&E Officer at KHT I have the privilege of meeting and speaking to other Karen people about their lives something which makes me proud to be Karen. I hope that people will understand us better and value the work with do with KHT to improve the lives of Karen people in these remote villages.
Pim
You can help us support more villages like Ban Eh Vee Jo by donating to our WASH Projects today!