OUR FRIENDS IN CAMBODIA :
Generational poverty and debt brought this family from the countryside into the city. Now, years later, hope of finding jobs, paying off debt, and returning to their home and friends, is a long ways away.
They live together in a one-room shack at the edge of the Phnom Penh garbage dump. Days are spent scavenging through mountains of garbage, searching for recyclables as their only means of income. It's beyond horrible.
A monthly $7 rent allows them to build shelter on the land, same as the 60 or so other families. At the end of the month, leftover money is for surviving, little to nothing going to debt owed. Seems hopeless.
It's hard to explain the feeling of this place. It stops you. Life questions come in loud and clear, one after the other.
I ask the woman on the left, who is in her early 40s, what her dreams are, what does she want for herself. She locks eyes with me, even when the interpreter translates. When he is done, she pauses and then says, "I don't have any dreams for myself, only for my children."
In this regard, she has won the lottery. Her three children are going to school at the Cambodian Children's Fund. There is hope that the generational poverty her grandmother, her mother, and herself have lived with, will end with her children.
I'm feeling overly warm, a bit lightheaded. I rub my eyes. Not sure if they sting because of the dust or the piles of burning garbage. I remember I'm supposed to be drinking water.
https://www.cambodianchildrensfund.org/
Phnom Penh | Rex
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