Phoung Rin and Lun Loang married in 1975. They lived in the same village but had never met. This was no traditional arranged marriage; this was one of the 200,000 marriages forced upon young people by the Pol Pot regime in the mid-Seventies as part of a social engineering program to produce a new generation of farmer-soldiers.
It is a period that Phoung Rin would prefer to forget, I learned, when I caught up with her tending the family’s cows near their rice paddy. But it also became clear that her marriage is untainted by the circumstances of its birth. I asked her if she and her husband love each other. Of course she said yes. So I suggested that given the circumstances perhaps it had taken hard work and time to find 
that love. “Actually, no”, she says, “it didn’t take long”. Many of these forced marriages ended in divorce in 1979 when the Pol Pot regime fell. Phoung Rin and Lun Leong chose to stay together.
They have two children: a married daughter aged 20 and working in a garment factory in Phnom Penh, and a sixteen year old son attending school.
Phoung Rin works the family’s two plots of land, growing rice and tending their three cows.
Until he became ill Lun Loang worked as a builder. He got ill around five years ago, but did not become severely incapacitated until a couple of years ago.
When I spoke to him at their home earlier in the day he showed me the pattern of large lumps visible across his body wherever he pulled his loose skin tight. His eyes are dulled. One doctor linked his illness to his liver, but more tests would be needed before there could be any certainty. He showed me a plastic bottle half full of dark liquid that he said contained his medicine, but no one seems to think this is anything more than a palliative.
Lun Leong spends a lot of time lying in pain on the wooden day bed under the house. When he is feeling up to it, he helps in the fields.
Their crops bring in around US$175 a year – not enough to feed themselves, let alone to cover the medical help they need or to keep their son equipped for his grade 10 studies.
Every few years one of their cows produces a calf that they can sell for US$150. That helps with ad hoc bills. They used to have more cows but sold a couple to cover visits to the hospital.
To cover the bulk of their living expenses they depend upon the income their daughter and her husband send from Phnom Penh. When their son-in-law was working in a garment factory alongside his wife the couple sent Phoung Rin around US$80 per month. The family could get by on this and could even contemplate medical help for Lun Loang. But the global financial crisis has hit Cambodia’s garment industry badly. The sector contracted by some 30% in value in 2009 compared to 2008. In July 2009 the factory where the son-in-law worked closed down, orders having dried up from the company’s crisis-hit principal market: the USA. Now the couple send Phoung Rin just US$25 to 30 a month.
Back in the hut overlooking her field I ask Phoung Rin how she deals with her husband’s illness. She says she has given up hope of them being able to find a cure for him. She cannot afford to do more for him.
There were no visible signs of emotion. No melodrama. I find as I travel from country to country and from story to story that for the people most acutely affected by the financial crisis the feeling of anguish is a rarely afforded luxury.
I asked her what she would do if they had more money again. “I would look everywhere for a cure, of course.”
It turns out it isn’t a cure she has given up on, but the ability to afford one.
