Letter from Thailand

Stueng Munchey, Phnom Penh's city dump, won't top anyone's list of must-see attractions in Cambodia but with 4,000 people living there I felt sure it would make for an interesting story. I talked my reluctant, slightly alarmed driver Narun into bringing me there and with a vomit-inducing stench, smouldering underground fires spewing toxic smoke and filthy, ragged people of all ages digging around for salable recyclables Steung Munchey was every bit the hell hole I expected it to be.

I wandered around, snapped a few photos and basically tried to act like I wasn't completely horrified by what I saw while the people who had to live there were looking. Before leaving, I decided to have a chat with some of Stueng Munchey's residents. I didn't really know where to start so I just walked up to one of the ramshackle huts, made out of garbage and sitting on top of garbage, and said hello in Khmer to the wary people sitting inside. The hut I chose was on the periphery of a concentration of larger, equally thrown together shacks which I suppose would constitute the centre of the community. I smiled my way up to the open front of the hut which was basically a raised platform made out of wooden pallets and posts topped by tattered sheets of blue plastic. A young woman who looked to be about 18 stood as I approached and immediately began conversing with Narun. I guessed the drill. If I wanted to gawk and snap pictures of her and the squalor she lived in I would have to pay for the privilege.

Once money had changed hands the girl went back inside. I walked closer to the entrance from where I could see that the shack, around the size of a box room in a Dublin council unit, housed four people. A phenomenally scruffy young guy of about 15 popped his head up from the filthy mat he he had been napping his day away on and gave me a sporadically toothed smile before plopping back down. The other occupants were two small children – one was a small girl who sat staring in clothes which were little more than dirty rags and the other was an infant of less than a year old. The youngest was lying naked on the platform dead to the world. Hundreds of flies crawled undisturbed all over the poor kid. It was probably the most disgusting thing I've seen in person.

I struggled through some basic questions and got basic answers in return. Sandar, the eldest girl, was sister to the teenage guy and mother to the two children. They had been living on Stueng Munchey for four years. Yes – it was a dangerous place to live and rats sniffed, scratched and nibbled at them while they slept. Of course disease was rampant because sanitation was non-existent. NGOs occasionally passed through and made tokenistic efforts at improving their lives but other than that the world left them to rot.

Sandar could have been quite pretty but Stueng Munchey had left its mark on her. Her face bore a raw looking scar she got when a fellow scavenger accidentally tossed a molten piece of plastic her way. These people didn't need me peering at their horrible lives so I thanked them for their time and, rather pointlessly, wished them well in the future knowing full well that their future would be as horrible, debased, and nightmarish as their present.

It was a relief to leave and I dived into the shower as soon as I got back to my hotel, which had magically transformed from basic to opulent during the hours I was away. The stench I carried with me fell away down the plug hole but the images – of forgotten haggard people digging around in pig shit and a filthy, malnourished child being feasted on by angrily buzzing flies – wouldn't be leaving any time soon.

I had one day left in Cambodia before I flew to Australia via Singapore to try my hand at being an immigrant and Stueng Munchey was the last place on my list of places to visit. My moto-driving friend Narun was confused and alarmed by this turn of events because Stueng Munchey is Phnom Penh's city dump. 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, smoldering rubbish.

The dump site has, of late, been swamped on all sides by the sprawl of the growing city it serves – largely because of Cambodia's rapidly urbanising population. Competition for space coupled with a government policy of expelling residents and then selling off any piece of land foreign companies or individuals express interest in means there is an ever-increasing number of families forced to live in despicable, horrific conditions on Stueng Munchey. Most of its inhabitants scrape together a living of sorts by sifting through newly arrived truck loads of rubbish for salable recyclables meaning the dump is both home and workplace.

“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 Munchey. 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 landfill. Normally, despite the poverty and hardship seen within its borders, the Cambodian spirit will be writ large across the faces of its people in the form of ever-present, infectious smiles. That optimism-against-the-odds attitude looked to have been beaten out of the people of Stueng Munchey a long time ago. The majority of people living in Southeast Asia are close to the poverty line, but Cambodia is at the bottom of the pile by some distance. Stueng Munchey'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. Narun slowed to walking speed and I jumped off. The spectacle in front of me, and I'm only exaggerating a little bit here, was like a vision of hell on earth. Through the sickly, toxic smoke leaking from rumbling underground fires I established that the hills of smoldering rubbish, 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 rubbish in the dizzying heat while, bizarrely, herds of long-haired, foul-smelling goats from God knows where scrambled bleating in the filth.

Trucks worked 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 than a dumper, 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 and from the other trucks. At a guess, I would say it was pig shit 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 ton of pig shit right in the middle of where all the new refuse had been left – the spot where the scavengers were searching.

I felt like dragging the lad out of the cab and drowning him in his little gift; and I didn't have to work in the putrid load's immediate vicinity in 30-odd degree heat for the coming days and weeks. The people picking through the rubbish however, didn't react. One thin, middle-aged guy put his hands on his hips and shook his head. Narun wanted to leave and so did I. Journalistic endeavour can only fuel you for so long. Before I went though, I wanted to find someone to talk to – someone who lived their entire life in this place where I had to fight hard to endure every moment.

A lengthy journey on motorbike and cobbled together river ferry brought me to Mekong Island and the home of my Cambodian buddy Narun – an orphaned Khmer Rouge survivor and former soldier turned moto driver and family man. Most Cambodians survive on less than a dollar a day and although Narun had a solid roof over their heads, they had little else. There was no running water or electricity and, I would discover, the form of sanitation being utilised was of a sort not seen in the west for centuries.
I didn't want to arrive empty handed so myself and Narun stopped off in a market in Phnom Penh at the beginning of our journey. A tropical climate meant we were spoiled for choice in the fruit and vegetable stakes, but this was no Tescos and meat was butchered and displayed on plastic sheets laid out on the grimy, watery walkways without any refrigeration. Flies crawled over bristly pig hinds, stunned plucked chickens and the roaring, red fingered women who sold them. Nothing really appealed so I gestured for Narun to take the lead. He pawed his way through several piles of assorted body parts before selecting and bagging up a few cuts that cost practically nothing. Despite this, his kids skipped on the spot and his wife beamed shyly when I handed over the bag of food.
Narun showed me inside his one-roomed house which acted, more-or-less exclusively, as a communal bedroom. I dumped my bag beside the blanket laid out under a mosquito net I would sleep on and headed back under the house to the sandy patch of earth between the teak stilts which was the centre of the home. As Narun's wife busied herself frying meat and steaming rice in the semi-outdoor kitchen, one of his daughters returned from a mission to round up the neighbourhood kids so they too could come and stare at the oddly pale young man who appeared to be getting ready to sleep in their home. Narun's youngest daughter remained where she was – staring gauntly from a hammock strung between two of the uprights. “She sick,” said Narun, nodding towards the shrunken child who had charged out to greet him only to return to her hammock, coughing pitifully as she went.
“No doctors on the island?” I asked, guessing the answer.
“Have clinic near to where we took ferry – on the mainland,” Narun answered. He dropped his head and stroked his daughter's hair and I didn't need to ask why the kid hadn't been taken there. It was because her father couldn't afford it.
Neighbours started arriving on masse as darkness fell in on us, bringing various dishes and treats with them for the celebration the arrival of a stranger apparently warranted. I asked Narun if there were any shops nearby where we might get a few beers to help oil the conversational wheels which had ground largely to a halt due to the fact that Narun was the only in our number with any English. A kid was dispatched and returned with a grin and a slab of beer cans. We had a good time by the light of a fire – we mimed conversations, stuffed our faces with nameless foodstuffs and got hammered.
When it came time to hit the hay, I stumbled up the steps of Narun's house and crawled under the mosquito net. Drunk as I was though, I got very little sleep. There's no more heartbreaking a thing to listen to than the sound of a mother trying helplessly to calm a sick, coughing, whimpering child in the darkness. At first glance the simplistic life lived by Cambodia's rural poor could almost be paradise. A tropical, verdant country which generously provides all the fresh fruit, vegetables and meat one could eat. Scratch the surface though, and you see exactly how valuable the technological and economical advancements made elsewhere in the world really are.
The cost of paying for Narun's daughter's medical treatment came to $40 US – a pittance for someone from one of the lucky countries. Unfortunately, it's over a month's wage for the average Cambodian and in all likelyhood her illness would have went untreated had a random foreigner not wandered into the picture at such a fabulous time to earn some easy Karma points.

My Cambodian moto driver made the mistake of casually mentioning that he could probably put me up in his rural home for a night or two, and I grabbed the opportunity to see a part of the country not on the tourist trail with what to Narun was probably disconcerting enthusiasm. Narun, an orphaned Khmer Rouge survivor who fought in the Cambodian Army before becoming a moto driver, has his home two hours from Phnom Penh in a place called Mekong Island – a massive, tropical sand spit in the middle of Asia's largest river which is only accessible by ferry.
The travel time and petrol costs involved in a trip from Mekong Island to the city centre where Narun makes his living means it isn't practical for him to return home after work. So, like hundreds of other drivers in the Cambodian capital, Narun works all day and then sleeps rough on the back of his bike most nights of the week. When money and time permits, usually once or twice a week, he heads home to spend time with his family.
It was a dusty, uncomfortable drive across the city centre and through the slums on Phnom Penh's outskirts on our way to the Mekong Island ferry, but the sight of the ferry itself made me want to jump onto Narun's bike and head straight back. The Mekong River – a massive, brown bubbling body of water – was stretched out before us with the shore of Mekong Island barely visible a couple of kilometres away. The vessel myself and the other passengers would attempt to traverse this Asian giant was, basically, a wooden shed nailed onto a some floating barrels with a beat up old motor strapped onto the back of it.
My fellow travellers; farmers returning from markets, school kids on their way home and moto drivers like Narun, were highly amused by both the presence of a 'barang', which had been nowhere to be seen for the last hour of our drive, and the look of dread I imagine I was sporting.
We skidded down the steep, muddy embankment and onto the hodge-podge of a craft we would trust our lives just as it spluttered into life and began to move away.
I attempted to keep as calm as I could in the cramped, oily bows of the ferry by sponging up the nonchalance of the other passengers crammed in around me. It wasn't difficult – they were all staring at me with expectant, beaming smiles plastered across their faces. “Hullloooo!” said a small Khmer girl in a tattered red dress from behind her mother's skirt. “Hello!” I answered with a smile. The rest of the group erupted into giggles and words of congratulations for the brave kid who dared to converse with the oddity in their midst. “Hullloooo!” yelled a scruffy, animated teenage guy from atop the clucking, chicken-filled bamboo basket he was sitting on. “Hello!” I answered over the roar of the struggling engine.
An awkward silence descended when the whole boat had greeted me with what appeared to be the only English word in circulation. Luckily, the girl in the red dress peered out from behind her mother's leg to save the day. “Hullloooo!” she said, smiling through the two fingers she had jammed into her mouth – and around we went again.
I scrambled off the 'ferry' when it beached itself on shore and helped Narun push his moto up the steep, gravelly bank. The passengers fanned out and headed off down dirt tracks that cut through the thick, lush vegetation that topped the island as we started the old bike up and made out towards Narun's home. “Remember Rob, we are very poor!” he warned me for the thousandth time.
The island itself was stunning. Traffic on the pathway was dominated by carts pulled by bony white cows and people either on foot or on battered bicycles. Trees heavy with mangoes, bananas, coconuts and a range of other unrecognisable fruits partially concealed beautifully constructed if basic stilted teak houses. The land occasionally opened up to reveal verdant fields dotted with lazily grazing livestock and bent figures in conical hats. Tourists are a rarity on Mekong Island and necks craned as we sped towards Narun's home. Narun visibly brightened as we neared our destination and when we finally arrived it wasn't difficult to see why. His two daughters ran, giggling and screaming from under his stilted house while his wife walked smiling from its main room. The poverty in the area made its presence felt in the absence of electricity, sanitation or running water, but Narun and his family had found a way of living which made their happiness not depend on such trivialities.