Welcome to the Fish on Farms blog! This blog will be chronicling the very exciting Fish on Farms (FoF) project, which is being jointly conducted by the University of British Columbia (UBC) and Helen Keller International (HKI) in the Prey Veng province of Cambodia.
First, a brief introduction to your blogger over the next few months. My name is Carly Isman, and I am a 4th year student in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems at UBC, studying Food, Nutrition, and Health. I’m in Cambodia from June through August to cover everything FoF-related, from press coverage to our baseline survey, which is coming up very soon! For those of you with shorter attention spans, I will also be tweeting.
In the short week that I’ve been here, a lot has happened. Most importantly, I met Dr. Christopher Charles and Ms. Kyly Whitfield, two people from UBC who will be here in Cambodia to work on the project and who have already been hard at work to get FoF organized. I attended my first Nutrition Working Group meeting, where I got to hear about several projects relating to nutrition that are currently underway in the country. I’ve been to HKI’s offices twice to meet the people who are working on FoF and to hammer out the details for the baseline survey. On top of all of that, I’ve been exploring Phnom Penh and learning about the city’s charming idiosyncrasies.
FoF has been in the press twice in the past week, which we’re very excited about! The International Development Research Center announced our project in a press release, while The Vancouver Sun wrote an article about our project. I’ll be discussing these in more detail later, but right now it’s dinner time (both for me, and for the mosquitoes who will inevitably eat me while I’m eating).