I had one day left in Cambodia before I flew on to Australia to try my hand at being an immigrant, and Stueng Meanchey was the last place on my list of places to visit. My motodup-driving friend Narun was confused and alarmed by this, because Stueng Meanchey is Phnom Penh’s city dump. But the reason why I wanted to visit, and what separates it from other landfill sites around the world, is that 4,000-odd people are currently living out there lives on top of its stinking, smouldering rubbish.
The dump has, as of late, been swamped on all sides by the sprawl of the growing city it serves – largely because of Cambodia’s rapidly urbanising population. This competition for space, coupled with a government policy of expelling residents and then selling off any piece of Cambodian land to whatever foreign companies and individuals express an interest, means there is an ever-increasing number of families forced to live in despicable, horrific conditions on Stueng Meanchey. Most of its inhabitants scrape together a living of sorts by sifting through newly arrived truckloads of rubbish for recyclables.
“Bad smell,” said Narun in his typically understated manner. It made me want to vomit. It made me want to tear my nose off and gouge out my sinuses. It was the sort of smell that makes your eyes water and your breath come in short repulsive gasps – and we hadn’t even got to the dump yet.
The narrow, litter-strewn street running from the main road to the dump itself seemed to be the economic centre of Steung Meanchey. Miserable, filthy people aged from four to 70 called a brief halt to their stacking and debating over freshly scavenged piles of old cans, bales of plastic and bags of crumpled paper to glare at the white boy speeding towards the rubbish heap.
Despite the poverty and hardship seen within its borders, Cambodian optimism is usually writ large across the faces of its people in the form of ever-present, infectious smiles. But that against-the-odds attitude seemed to have been beaten out of the people of Stueng Meanchey a long time ago.
The majority of people living in South East Asia are close to the poverty line, but Cambodia is at the bottom of the pile by some distance. And Stueng Meanchey’s haunted residents are the poorest of the poor, living in a squalor lost to the western world a century ago – and they know it.
The road gives out directly onto a track which runs along the surface of the rubbish heap. The spectacle in front of me – and I’m only exaggerating a little bit here – was a vision of hell on earth. Through the sickly, toxic smoke leaking from rumbling underground fires, I established that the hills of refuse, like the one I was standing on, stretched out in every direction as far as the eye could see. Ragged, beaten figures pawed hopelessly through the trash in the dizzying heat while, bizarrely, herds of long-haired, foul-smelling goats from God-knows-where scrambled bleating in the filth.
We could see trucks working their way towards some vaguely designated dumping point, around which most of the scavengers congregated. We hauled the bike and ourselves off the track into the garbage as they rumbled passed. One came along that was more of a container truck, and a thick, pale-brown liquid was sloshing around in its open-topped back. Clumps of it occasionally sploshed over the side. It stank in a very different way to the rest of the dump. At a guess, I would say it was pig excrement from a battery farm somewhere on the city’s outskirts. The driver could have dumped it anywhere, but he trundled right up behind the other trucks and emptied what must have been a good three tonnes of porcine faeces in the middle all the new refuse – the very spot where the scavengers were searching.
I felt like dragging the driver out of the cab and drowning him in his own deposit. But the people picking through the rubbish didn’t react. One thin, middle-aged guy put his hands on his hips and simply shook his head.
Narun wanted to leave, and so did I. Journalistic endeavour can only fuel one for so long. But before I went, I wanted to find someone to talk to, someone who had lived their entire life in this place where I had to fight hard to endure every moment.
To be continued...
