A Day In the Life of a Cambodian Family

Our friend Salt took us to visit his inlaws in a small village outside of Battambang. We spent the day with the family enjoying being part of their daily life. The family of 3 adult children and the parents, make the wrappers you use to make spring rolls. Hundreds and hundreds of them each and everyday. They take an everage of three days a month off but I think there is a small bit of flexibility to fill in for each other. They stop completely for the day if Moom, who is Salt's new wife, gets ill.
The family has a house for sleeping but acutally live and work in the open air area under the house as the house is built in the air. All of their neighbours do the same thing but their set up was the most organized and clean.
They start at four thirty in the morning making a fire using rice husks as fuel. It's fed into the fire through a hopper made from a wooden crate. I estimated that in full production they refill the hopper at least once an hour. The stove is a mud affair with two holes in the top and open on the floor so you can drag out the ashes. There are two pots of boiling water sunk into the holes and they're nearly full covered with a taut piece of heavy cloth. Just enough opening is left to let out steam.
There is a platform beside the stove which the person cooking squats on. They have their feet covered with rags to protect them from the heat and a bowl of rice gruel in front of them.The only machine is a grinder to make the rice into flour which later becomes the gruel. To the left of the platform is a revolving bamboo rack to lay the wet, cooked wrappers on.
When the fire is hot enough the day really begins. Moom and her mom do the cooking . They put a small bowl full of the gruel on the hot cloth on top of the pot and quickly smooth it out and cover it with a lid ( which also get very hot but I didn't see them use a pot holder). They then so the same on the second pot and by then the lid can be moved onto the second pot and the first wrapper is scraped off the cloth and hung on the revlovling rack. It must all be done at a certain rythmn and everything must be kept at the perfect level of wetness for it all to work.
Behind the person cooking a large woven bamboo drying rack is waiting. the second person takes the wet wrappers off the relvolving rack and spreads them on the drying rack. The drying rack holds about 60 wrappers and when it is filled it is taken outside to be placed in the sun on a frame to dry. When they are nearly dry they are taken into the shade and the rack is placed nearly upright . When they are satisfied that the wrappers are correctly dried they peel them off the rack and put them in a large basket.
This process goes on without interruption until about 4 in the afternoon. At that point everyone takes a break until there is a light dew on the grass, about 5:30. You see while those wrappers were drying they were puffing up. Now they must be placed on the grass to get slightly damp so that they flatten and then they can be stored.
I asked how much they are sold for and I was told that for roughly 100 wrappers they bring in 50 cents. That does not include any expenses like the rice, machine to grind the rice, fuel and implements.
None of this was easily done as we found out by trying. The atove is hot and steam is rising inyour face and you have to be quick. The heat must be kept at exactly the right level. It's not easy to spead the wet, cooked wrappers out on the rack. they are also easily broken whentheyare dry so taking them off the racks is more difficult.
I asked how long they have been doing this and they said their grandmother's grandmother's grandmother did it too and so on down the generations.
These wonderful people let us into their lives with big smiles. They fed us and gave us hammocks to lay in for the afternoon while they continued to work and the only one that could speak English was our friend Salt. There wasn't a lot of talking between us and the family but there was a whole lot of communing going on!

As a footnote to this, the older members of the family lived through the Pol Pot regime and genocide. How, I really don't know. There were many battles in their area with the Khmer Rouge. I don't think there is a man, woman or child in Cambodia that hasn't been affected in some way.