When The Small Things Become Everything

How clean water, latrines, and a small envelope of cash helped one family survive displacement, and begin to rebuild. 

It has been a month since Ratana's family came home from New Chong Kal Safety Centre. Home, the word still feels fragile. He takes a deep breath, eyes scanning the yard, the packed motorbike cart still sitting by the door, the few chickens that survived. Then, quietly, he begins to talk about the months that changed everything. 

When fighting flared along the Cambodia-Thai border and clashes reached Oddar Meanchey Province, Hout Ratana and his wife, Oeurn Pon, were not at home. They had taken their nine-year-old son to the clinic for an eye infection. They were on their way back when the first explosions began. Smoke crept along the horizon. The thud of blasts drew closer. They turned the motorbike around and raced back to the village but their twelve-year-old daughter, who had been at school, was nowhere to be found.

With nothing but the clothes on their backs and one motorbike between them, the family joined hundreds of others heading for the nearest safe place. They searched frantically before finding their daughter at a makeshift assembly point near the local pagoda, New Chong Kal, that became a temporary camp almost overnight.

Tarpaulins replaced rooftops. The hum of drones replaced birdsong. Where rice and cassava fields had once shaped every season, daily life narrowed to the basics: food, safety, and most urgently water and sanitation.

The only nearby water source was a murky pond. Families used it for washing; safe drinking water was almost impossible to find. Latrines were few and overcrowded. For Pon, who worried constantly about her children's health, those shortages brought relentless anxiety. Before relief organizations arrived, Ratana spent hours each day riding his motorbike to collect a single barrel of water, each trip a gamble.

The water they managed to collect from the pond was not safe to drink. They used it for washing and avoided it for cooking when they could. Ratana developed an ear infection from the contaminated water; to this day, his left ear does not hear well.

Their daughter's health added further strain. She had a condition requiring frequent toilet use, but with only a handful of latrines and long queues forming at all hours, Pon would wake the children before dawn, around 4 a.m., just to try to beat the line. Often, it was already long. "She had to queue many times a day," Pon says. "though it was hot and dehydrated, I begged her not to drink too much because going to the toilet was so difficult."

Then Oxfam and partners arrived with the financial support from the Government of Ireland, Belgium and Australia. Clean water points were established, additional latrines were built, and hygiene kits were distributed. For Ratana and Pon's family, the change was immediate.

The additional facilities shortened queues and reduced the humiliation and danger that come when women and children are forced to wait in the open or resort to open defecation. Clean water points meant families no longer had to rely on the pond or send a father on a perilous daily journey reducing both risk and fuel costs. It wasn't a solution to everything, but in a place where uncertainty dominated every decision, it was a genuine reprieve.

Water and sanitation rarely make headlines. They are not dramatic in the way a single rescue might be. But for families like Ratana and Pon's, they are foundational to surviving displacement. Clean water reduced the risk of diarrheal disease. Functioning latrines restored dignity. Fewer dangerous trips meant less exposure to harm. For Pon, the effect was tangible fewer sick days, less fear, one less daily burden to carry.

The support did not stop with taps and toilets. Oxfam's cash assistance also reached the family, fifty dollars in an envelope that felt, in that moment, like an improbable gift. They had fled without pots, pans, or even a cooking spoon. The money was modest in the abstract but enormous in practice. They spent it on gasoline, cooking oil, and medicine. Pon also bought a mango and shared it with the children. It was a small comfort, a moment of sweetness amid trauma. That fifty dollars, managed carefully, carried them through a month.

Together, these interventions created breathing room. When water flowed and toilets were accessible, parents could sleep a little easier. When cash covered the essentials, families could think ahead rather than simply react. That window of stability is precisely what enables the next steps of recovery which is returning home, repairing damage, and beginning to rebuild.

When a ceasefire held and the family returned home but brought a new set of problems. Three of the family's cats had died. Most of their chickens were gone. Their five hectares of rice and cassava, the land that had sustained them for years, remained out of reach. Mines and unexploded ordnance had littered fields and homesteads. Landmine clearance teams have fenced off parts of their property, and until the land is declared safe, they cannot plough, sow, or harvest.

With the fields inaccessible and few animals left, Ratana and Pon have adapted again. They are planting vegetables close to the house and raising the few chickens that survived. They dream of rebuilding a small flock, perhaps getting a pig but every new investment carries the weight of uncertainty. The risk of having to flee again makes each decision feel heavy.

In front of their house, a motorbike cart sits packed and ready. The pack includes food, kitchenware, clothes, a water barrel. The family keeps it prepared, just in case.

"We hope we don't have to use it," Ratana said quietly. "We just want to be home and to rebuild.”

Ratana still remembers what life used to be. How planting and harvest filled the calendar, how his children went to school without worry. "Life was comfortable before," he said. "We want to work our land and give our children a future. But I am not sure now."

For families uprooted by conflict, hope often arrives in modest forms: a latrine that lets a young girl use the toilet without fear, a water point that saves a father from a perilous daily trip, fifty dollars that keeps a family fed for a month. These are the interventions that steady households in crisis that allow people to come home and try again.

Yet meeting immediate needs is only part of the journey. For Ratana, Pon, and thousands of families like them, the path to a full recovery runs deeper through peaceful fields cleared of landmines, through restored infrastructure, through livelihoods rebuilt from the ground up. That recovery begins with a permanent ceasefire and the conditions that allow economic and social life to return to normal.

It is not a return to what was lost. But it is the direction worth moving toward. Oxfam and its partners remain committed to working closely with authorities and communities mobilizing resources to address urgent humanitarian needs today, while laying the groundwork for the resilience and recovery that displaced families deserve tomorrow.