Steung Meanchey Visited
I write this after about 5 hours of hot showering. (edit: well, started writing it. The net went down, so I had to post-pone so to say)
We met at 10:30 at Bogie and Bacall restaurant/bar and Rose, and I and about 6 other traveling volunteers packed into the back of this flatbed truck and headed out.
Our first stop was the markets to buy 400 loaves of bread. $35 well spent la? After loading the bread onto the truck, we trooped across the street into the fruit and veg market. Because this was the first day of the Chinese New Year (aka Tet, to the East) the market was dead and most of the vendors were more interested in playing cards, seriously giving David the shits.
Apart from a being pretty rude, gruff and crude when buying food (there’s 0 ruff and crude people in Cambodia that I’ve seen) I can’t fault David. From what I’ve seen, if you ask someone “How much?” they start at 4x the price, then you barter them down. If that fails, you start walking away and they call you back and say “ok, ok” and look all upset, until you give them the money. His tactic was “How much?” “$answer = $price x 4;” “YOU’RE CRAZY!” then we walk off lol. Fun to watch though.
I can’t expect much more from Cambodian market stall owenrs considering we’ve got a dude cutting a swathe through a market, followed by 8 backpackers. We look like a money train.
I think after 5 years of living here, and bartering for this food, he would have at least bothered to learn enough Khmer to barter for 10 kilo’s of oranges, instead of telling one Cambodian guy “You learn English, you do better business”. Saying this in a wholesale market which supplies Cambodian market stall owners was a bit too much to stomach, but we all let that one slide, even though afterwards a number of people mentioned it.
We finally got all the oranges, bananas and nashi fruit onto the truck and headed out to the dump.
We were all on the back of a flatbed truck, and it was interesting to see how traffic flowed from the truck end, because I know what it’s like from a motorcycle point of view with trucks coming at ya, like Maggie Thatcha. Trucks are like Moses here parting the sea of Hondas.
Some people started by cutting heads of the bananas that held them in “hands” and threw them overboard onto the road. Funniest part being when one of the dudes hit a truck filled with Chinese on their way to a tet festival with the dragons in the back of the truck dancing. I nearly shat. I then told that fella that if he can hit a “fucking Humvee” I’ll be his slave for a week. I meant it, but there was no hummers on the road today.
Ooh. p.s. Pol Pot owned a Toyota Land Cruiser. That’s the final nail in the coffin for these 4wds. But I digress….
I notice some weird looking buildings that I realise are recycling warehouses and I realise we’re getting close. As soon as we arrived, we had a throng of screaming and laughing kids chasing us down the road. I use the word “road” loosely. The acrid smoke from the hundreds of tonnes of smoldering plastic bags filled my nostrils and stuck there.
I was on crowd control with a few other dudes and Rose and a few others collated the food on the back of the truck and handing it out to the kids.
It was madness, but more organised than I thought it would be. Two lines, loosely boys and girls – to stop the girls from getting barge-arsed out the way.
Took quite a few photos of the kids in the lines, which prompted them to ham it up to an incredible degree. I would like to award, the DOUBLE FIST play of the day to this kid. *click me Mums* I couldn’t stop laughing at this awesome, tag-team double pose him and his mate pulled out. Hilarious shit.
We fed all kids who came, a few times. Most of the kids didn’t realise that we’d happily feed them two or three times if there was enough to go around, which there was but this didn’t stop them from running off into the rubbish to bury their food and come back with a slightly different outfit. Some kids would just take off a piece of clothing and come back, more and more naked until it was a bum and willy fest grabbing bread and banana, so to speak.
It was funny as, one girl came back wearing a stupid hat and kroma that she wasn’t wearing before and I pointed at her hat and laughed my ass off. She just smirked at me and progressed in the line. This shows up in some photos as well, the same kid, wearing different shit, or nothing at all. The girl I was referring to is there. How many can you spot? OOOH CHALLENGE!
It was a mixture of hilarious kids being funny as hell and stuff I don’t want to ever see again. Examples to follow.
At one point, I had about 5 kids high and low five-ai-ing me as hard as they could. Now they get points for trying to hurt my hand by slapping it, and trying to squeeze it when shaking my hand, but malnourished kids are piss weak and I beat em all! NO FIST AWARD!
One dude came up to me with his naked kid, speaking Khmer to me. He was pointing to his kids legs for a reason I wasn’t sure of at the time. Then he placed his kid on his legs on the ground, and they didn’t move. They stayed straight, then he just toppled over. He repeated this a few times, showing me his kid couldn’t walk and there was something seriously fucked with his kid.
He’s looking at me for some kind of help, like I can fix his kid’s polio or what-have you. I went to the truck and told them there was people asking for medical attention which is a norm so they set up a medical station and started treating cuts and stuff, which there were a LOT considering the whole dump is just broken glass and plastic bags.
The guy came up to me later, talking to me in Khmer with the same desperate look on his face. What can you do?
Another guy, who had at some point had a stroke and couldn’t walk properly and was a bit south in the brain, came up and talked to me for about 2 minutes in Khmer. Looking at me strange when I didn’t respond to anything he said. It’s weird when some dude, covered in garbage-goo, without any real teeth and propped up by a stick talks to you in a foreign language for a while, then poses for a radical photo (he’s in the Dump Photo Set).
One dude, after we’d fed everyone, was asking me for some water so I handballed him about 4 big chunks of ice from the esky. He looked pretty stoked and sucked em and looked a bit chuffed.
In conclusion: These kids, and their parents (who some carry this look of shame on them) live and work -IN- garbage. They collect bottles and shit for the recycling companies around them and make about $0.75c per day. The dump they work in has pools and rivers through it of toxic and shit waste and the air they breathe is a mixture of toxic smoke, dust (garbage and dirt) and god knows what other disease is in that air. I’d say half the food they eat is from garbage (I saw a woman finding something mildly edible in the rubbish she was sorting through, and eat it.) and the other half is sourced fuck-knows where.
We donated $500AUD to this cause, using $250 that was given to us to give to an Orphanage. But after checking out the orphanages here, and checking out the kids in the dump, we thought this was the better cause. 100%, I mean 100% of the cash goes into the kids food, and into their mouths, so that’s cool.
They go out about 2-3 times a week and $1USD feeds three kids. FTW. Thanks Az for donating through their website too.
I’ve been listening to the Dead Kennedys since 1995 and only this week do I properly understand their song “Holiday In Cambodia”. I’m I’m 30 years too late!
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