A Cambodian connection

Of the 480 booths at Market Days, only one sells organic peppercorns and hand crafted items from Cambodian organizations.

We operate the Pepper Project at Booth 362, just inside Gate 3. The first Saturday of every month (except January and February) you’ll find us there selling all kinds of goods from that impoverished Southeast Asian nation.

We have jewelry made by a women’s cooperative, wood products made from the plentiful palm tree, paper bracelets which help keep kids in school and, of course, gourmet peppercorns from Cambodia’s Kampot Province.

We started selling Kampot pepper about 10 years ago and over the years have added more and more. We now have hundreds of products which we personally purchase on our annual trips over there. We know everyone with whom we do business and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

The profits from our sales all go back to various causes in Cambodia. With the help of some generous donors, we sponsor 22 students in a small rice-farming village, providing them with bikes, school supplies, shoes and uniforms. Some of the profits fund swim lessons for the students because there’s water everywhere and many Cambodians can’t swim. We also support a couple of animal rescue operations in Phnom Penh.

A large portion of the funds we raise go to the Kep International School to help pay for the “scholarship” students they admit; students who are admitted at no charge due to poverty, child labor prevention or domestic violence.

We sponsor a young woman, Hour (pronounced who-aaa), who is the daughter of an itinerant fisherman. When she was six years old, Hour would stand outside the fence that surrounds the Kep school and watch the students inside. The director of the school got to know her and found that she was very bright and had great potential. They asked us if we would sponsor her and we jumped at the opportunity. We promised Hour we would pay for her schooling as far as she wants to go. She’s in the eighth grade now and recently won the district Spelling Bee. She’s the first person in her family to attend school and she’s bright as can be. She’s the kind of person Cambodia needs to battle the poverty and corruption that is everywhere. She just needed a helping hand.

Did you know?
Tom Gordon does more than write articles for the Wimberley View. He also has a booth at Market Days that helps raise money for a village in Cambodia

This all started after our first trip there when we fell in love with the tortured little country (it’s about the size of the state of Missouri). We now know many who survived the genocide of the late 1970s where an estimated two million people, out of a population of nine million were killed by a madman named Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge regime. The owner of the farm where we buy our Kampot pepper was born in a labor camp where her father and uncle were both murdered.

Every one of our products has a story behind it. Many of the items are made from recycled materials, purses from fishing nets, bracelets from spoons and forks, totes and backpacks fashioned from old cement bags. We have a large assortment of traditional Cambodian scarves called krama. Cambodians wear krama around their necks, wrap them around their heads and carry their babies in them.

Many chefs consider Kampot pepper to be the best pepper in the world. It’s been organically grown using the same techniques for more than 1,000 years. The peppercorns are dried in the sun and sorted by hand. Around 1900, when Cambodia was part of French Indochina, nearly the entire Kampot pepper crop was shipped to the best restaurants in Paris. During the reign of the Khmer Rouge, the pepper vines withered and died. Kampot pepper is making a comeback today. Pepper Project was among the first to import it into the United States 10 or so years ago.

We visit Cambodia every year (it’s about 21 hours in the air). Our Cambodian “daughter” Srey Neth, who lives in Phnom Penh, helps us run Pepper Project from that end. She pays the vendors, collects the products, helps us distribute our donations and makes sure everything is properly packed and shipped (air freight is expensive, about $12 a kilo, which is 2.2 pounds).

If you are at Market Days, please stop by Booth 362. If you enter Gate 3 we are right there. We love to talk about pepper, Cambodia and our unique products. It’s always a fun day with the crowds, the food, and live music just up the hill.

One hundred percent of the profits from your purchase goes back to the deserving people of Cambodia in the form of scholarships and donations.

If you can’t make it out there, you can go to www.pepperproject.org to see some of our products, read our story and try some of the pepper-centric recipes.