The Precious Girl magazine

When I was in Cambodia at the end of last month, I watched little TV. It's partially due to the fact that I couldn't understand anything on TV, and there's the fact that my daily routine consisted work, travel around in our tuk-tuk and sleep for me (and a little shopping thrown in occasionally).

There was a TV at the restaurant near the slums where we had lunch with the interviewees for the vocational trainees. It was in Thai and it featured someone teaching its viewers how to wash their faces, complete with diagrams and arrows telling the viewers the direction to move the facial foam.

I was quite amused at the beginning, because it reminded me of the time when I was a child and I used to rub facial foam all over my face haphazardly, in all directions. I would then wash it off with water. I have since learnt the correct way to wash my face from beauty consultants (engaged by the convent school I was in) to teach basic beauty care.

Then it struck me how Cambodian women are a delicate mix between a girl and a woman.
On one hand, they were holding down jobs to feed their families (something I never had to deal with when I was 13), and on the other hand, they are painfully unaware of the workings of the society around them.

The Precious Girl magazine is for girls I have described above. Movie stars and women wearing next to nothing have no place in this magazine. Instead, this magazine is filled with beauty, homemaking and relationship-forming tips for Cambodian women. The models are real-life Cambodian factory workers and the target market for this magazine is precisely that: Cambodian women who are factory workers.

Alas, I probably can't read the physical copy of the magazine because it's all written in Khmer. But if you want to support this magazine's cause (help Cambodian women who are factory workers create a sense of self-worth), you can donate to them to help keep the price of the magazine at 1500 riels (that is roughly US$0.38) so that it is affordable for Cambodian girls to buy them each quarter.