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.
