The shop was a little ways off the national highway, and was hard to find if you did not know what you were looking for. When I finally found it, I met the owner just as he was finishing lunch. I explained that I looking to purchase a guppy, and he smiled as he told me to wait a few minutes while he finished lunch. He was a rather charming man, with large eyes and a propensity to laugh in a way that seemed almost crazy. His dialect was also rather strange, and I maybe understood half of what he told me. When he finished eating, when we went behind his house into the interior of his shop. The entire place was filled with ceramic water containers, potted plants, vines, makeshift ponds, and glass tanks. He kept over a dozen kinds of fish there, and I watched him as he went around and tended to each of them. Finally he asked what fish I wanted to buy, and I picked out one that was inside an empty glass bottle. After I paid, I said goodbye and jumped in a taxi to go back to Angkor Chum.
When I returned home, I started asking around if anybody knew about the benefits of having a fish live in their water containers. Not surprisingly, very few people knew about them. Then one day as I was puttering around the town, I came up with a brilliant idea for a project. I could start a guppy farm at school! Students would be placed in charge of taking care of the fish, and everyone would learn about the dangers of mosquito born illnesses such as Dengue Fever, Malaria, Japanese Encephalitis, and a whole range of others that are just simply awful. We could then sell the guppies we raise, and distribute them to people in the town. Brilliant!
To do this, however, I need help getting water storage containers to raise the fish in. I pitched the idea to the staff of an agricultural NGO named ADRA, which had a branch office in Angkor Chum. The staff at the office told me to talk to the Siem Reap office, which in turn told me to talk to country director of the whole NGO. It was a classic case of, “Oh, you better talk to my supervisor,” all the way until I got the email address of someone who could take responsibility for a project. I promptly wrote him a very nice letter about what I wanted to do:
[To the Director of ADRA,
My name is Adrian Stover, and I am a United States Peace Corps volunteer currently living in Angkor Chum district, Siem Reap province Cambodia. I am writing to you to discuss a project I am developing at Angkor Chum High School. As part of a dengue and malaria prevention and education program, I am working on developing a “guppy farm” located on the grounds of the school. Guppies are currently being used in many parts of Cambodia to control the mosquito populations that spread malaria and dengue fever. The small fish are placed in water tanks, and eat the mosquito larvae that breed in them. This prevents many mosquitoes from maturing into adults, and reduces the amount of mosquitoes in a certain area. This practice has shown to be very effective. According to the August 2007 issue of Health Messenger magazine, “A recently completed study in Trapeang Kong commune, Kampong Speu province, found that adding a few guppy fish to water storage containers resulted in 80 per cent reduction of mosquitoes in the commune.” If this technique was applied to the community of Angkor Chum, it is possible that the same effects could happen and could cause the rate of dengue fever to go down.
What I propose to do is to procure several water storage containers, some fish food, some guppies, and start a “guppy farm” of sorts at Angkor Chum High School. The high school is an ideal location for such a project because it would allow the students to learn about the project. Selected students would be trained on how to take care of the guppies on a weekly basis, and would continue the project long after I finish my term of service. When enough guppies have bred, the school can sell them to students or community members as a way of paying for the food and making money for the school. There is also a spare bulletin board at the school that could be used to display information about the fish, the project, and the benefits of having guppies in the water tank.
I believe that a “guppy farm” project would be a great venture between Angkor Chum High School, ADRA, and The United States Peace Corps. Thank you very much in consideration for my request. I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Sincerely,
-Adrian Stover]
Two weeks went by, and still I heard nothing from ADRA. I was not too distraught because I was working on the World Map project at the time, which was keeping me busy. However, this NGO was one that I really wanted to work with. Through several visits to the ADRA office in Angkor Chum and Siem Reap, I finally tracked down the phone number for the country director. After a few days of trying to get him on the phone, I finally managed to speak to him about the project. He said it sounded very interesting, and said that he would talk to the staff about it.
The following week, I made an appointment to meet with someone who could take charge on the ADRA side. They agreed to donate some concrete water rings, as well as a few posters about Dengue Fever and the dangers of mosquitoes. By the end of the week, I had four concrete water containers in the area behind the school office and some large glossy posters. And so I went about setting up the guppy farm.
The way the current system works is this: There are four water rings in use. Two of them are used for breeding, and the other two are used as a nursery for the baby guppies. The breeding rings contain two female guppies and one male, which invites a snicker from even the oldest person who works at the school. (Maturity levels are non-existent here) When it looks like a female guppy is going to give birth (you can tell by the swelling in her abdomen), she is moved to another ring where she can produce the offspring. After she has given birth, she is moved back to her original ring. The danger in keeping her in the same ring as her offspring lies in the fact that she may be inclined to eat her children. (Nature can be very cruel) Without a system like this in place, the whole purpose of producing guppies would be lost. It took me a little while to figure out what was happening to the baby guppies when they disappeared, but once I figured out what was going on I put this system in place.
Once I figured how a breeding system would work, I recruited six students from one of my English classes to help care for the fish. I held a training session with them during a Thursday afternoon and made a little pamphlet about how to take care of the fish. I explained how the fish needed a bucket of fresh water everyday to replenish their oxygen supply, and we organized a schedule for a different student to do this on each day of the week. One student also volunteered to feed them twice a week.
Right now the students are completely in charge of taking care of the fish, which is exactly what I wanted. Hopefully they will teach others, and this project will continue long after I have left for America. The people at the school have been very supportive of the project, and I think the students really enjoy it. I have posters hung up on the wall near the water rings, so that people interested in learning about the fish can read about them in Khmer. I am also in the middle of building a small garden around the water rings with flowers and gravel walkways. It should be done by the end of the year.
All that’s left for us to do is to figure out how to sell the guppies to people in the community, and for how much. But so far, this is one project I have done that has been more successful than I thought it would be.
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