Obstacle vs. Success
Ms. Chheun Tevy’s Life Story
Published: 22 March 2023
Tevy is now 25 years old; she was born in Kratie province. She’s got 3 siblings (1 male), and she got polio when she young. Her disability really affects her emotions and face with discriminations like people calling her disability not her name, used inappropriate words, imitated the way she walked, and so forth. Especially, her relative and neighbor didn’t support her to go to school. They just thought that registering to school was not necessary for a disabled girl like her. However, because the support and motivation from her parents especially her grandfather who often said to her “he didn’t have ability to leave her lots of money or treasure, but he could help and encourage her to go to school and gain knowledge which can be huge treasure that she can earn for her life like the others. Therefore, please tried to study as hard as possible.”
For Tevy, even though she faced many barriers in life, she never ends up her life with hopelessness, and she doesn’t care what other people think about her appearance. She tried her best to study and graduated from high school in 2008 and bachelor degree in 2013 majoring in Human Resource Management.
After graduated she started to involve working with disability sectors with some organizations including Cambodian Disabled Pepple Organization (CDPO) for 5 years, Women radio Fm 102 for 2 years, ADD for 3 years, and she is now working as a team leader at a local organization based in Kratie province. Now She is working with PAfID. She was very happy when she worked there because she learned a lot from work such as project management, financial assistance and getting the opportunity to be a guest speaker on a radio program and also a national presenter too.
In particular, she won a national badminton gold medal in November 2022. She said she never thought she could do it because playing sports requires a lot of caution. But what made her win was that she used her brain strategy and high alertness. On June 3-9, 2023, the ASEAN Para Games will be held in Cambodia, and she sincerely hopes to win a gold medal for Cambodia.
She has a dream of becoming a director of a big Electronic Company in Cambodia.
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Throughout our work, we have learnt that actors in the field of development need to go through organizational and systematic processes of change within their programs to move towards sustainable (disability) inclusion. We support these processes at community, organizational and governmental level.