Stung Meanchey Blues

Stung Meanchey is an industrial area in southern Phnom Penh. Not industrial in a Detroit sense, but for Cambodia, it's industrial. Textile factories, etc. Sort of like Garland for those of you who know Dallas. In the middle of the area is the garbage dump for PP. I guess you could say landfill for reference, but not really. (I have a trained eye for waste). You should look up pictures and articles on it. I'll post my pics eventually, but many professional photographers have taken better pics than mine. Read up.

Around the dump, which is a pretty big place, are little 'villages' of unbelievably poor people who's entire existence is based on digging through the dump for sellable materials. Recyclables, useful items, cloth, etc... There are actual houses in the traditional wooden plank style, tarps pulled over a string to make basic tents, old unused concrete buildings with no windows or doors with people squatting, people just sleeping outside, people living under houses, ... you really just have to see it. Some of the children in Stung Meanchey, so I've heard, don't even know where Phnom Penh is. Stung Meanchey is part of Phnom Penh. Most of the people there cannot read. Like I have mentioned in my other posts, the people, even there, are always smiling. Think about that when you take you rubbish to the curb.

The first time I went, my third day here, we went on bikes to check out the 'room' we rented to open our permanent clinic. Think of a storage unit, a small one, with a bathroom of sorts. Nader took his bike and I rode on the back of Sam's. The roads there are pretty shitty. Really pretty very pretty shitty. Nader got stuck, and thankfully he was in front so we avoided the pit. A little further on I noticed that we must be close. Now, the smell of Phnom Pehn is pretty amazingly strong and.... um... diverse... to begin with. Now I KNEW that we were nearby. When I was younger I went to a landfill with my cousin and it was chokingly strong. I smoke and I have worked in factories... I have lived in pretty shitty places, I had a hunting family (gutted deer in the garage)... I am no stranger to bad smells. I had to stop Sam when we were close to our destination because I thought I was going to spill. We all had our surgical masks on and I was holding my breath. I would almost say that the smell was affecting my vision.

The dump is.... a giant mountain of trash. Paper rubbish, rotting vegetation, sour food, chemicals, medical waste, used rubbers, the occasional dead body, old clothes... you get the idea. It was nearing dark when we got there.. maybe 45 minutes left. We have to drive through the fringe of it, dodging around huge piles of shit and people carrying giant bags of rubbish, sifting through trash on the ground, or just wandering around. Over on the 'mountain' I see people shovelling rubbish into bags and sifting. Over to the left, on the side of the mountain is someone burning trash in a small ...campfire, I suppose. I think he or she is cooking. Hard to tell. Thankfully the people are wearing long sleeves, rubber boots or shoes, gloves, hats, and have krama or just random cloth around their faces. As I heard it, only a year ago they didn't take such precautions... kids ran around the dump naked. I didn't see this. It may still go on, but not in front of me. Again, it's a big place.

We get to the building where Nader has rented the room and hop off our bikes. Nader, Sam, and the landlord exchange pleasantries while I stand and look around, taking in the place in panorama.Some people start coming to where we are, having seen us pull in. Guess what they're doing. Give up? Smiling. They are smiling. Sam looks at me and smiles pointedly. I turn back to them and smile big and say "hello, hello". We talk to the landlord and take a few photos of the space. The landlord's daughter is running around, picking at some food that's layed out on a brick on the ground. She's running around smiling, waving and then running behind something, smiling a big, shy Khmer smile.
The landlord tells us that he can pour some more concrete to 'pave' the area in front of our door and that, if we need it, he can rent the room next door to us for use as a supply room. Hopefully we'll need it. (Since then, he's rented out all of the units, so we'll have to wait to rent the second unit... we've basically decided to rent 2 more as soon as they come available at +$5 what he's asking, which is $20 per month)
We sort of wander around, looking at the place and brainstorming how best to set everything up, etc... talk about how to paint it, that kind of thing. Nader tells us that a woman he knows who lives there is fairly educated and he wants to pay her a little bit to help get people to come, do a little translating and informing... she's not around for us to talk to though. He had gotten her a job somewhere making $50 per month... most likely a textile factory... and she had liked it at first, but she said that paying for a moto to and from work it came to a little less money than digging in the dump. I realised at that point that you can't just come over here and unsheath your dollar riding on your white western education and rescue someone. Although I consider most of these people's situations dire and of basically emergency proportions, it's not like pulling someone out of a burning building. I have been poor before.... well, shit. I used to think that... Ok, by American standards I have been poor and locked into a cycle of hand to mouth existence that seems impossible to escape, so I have a tiny inkling of what this is like. It really isn't as easy as "hey, can I borrow $X so I can get my life back in order in one shot?". You really have to climb back up. As I said, I realised that it isn't going to be as simple as I thought. What we have to do is provide guidance, not handouts. And we have to provide guidance to people who don't know how old they are, what their last name is or if they do, they don't know how to spell it. The clinic is just a tiny part of the process.
We say our goodbyes to the landlord and the little princess and head over on the bikes toward where we came in to look at a woman who was in a moto accident. We're not completely sure what happened, but they tell us she's in alot of pain. Nader, in the lead again, gets stuck again. This time it's big plati-burlap bags of trash. They bag them up in what look like giant rice bags and drag them over near their houses... huts.. whatever, to sort through them more thoroughly and we had to get past a barracade of them... like giant, stinky sandbags. Good thing we're on dirtbikes. I get off and drag the one bag that caught Nader's back wheel over to the side. Some putrid liquid that, if you believe in such things, could easily be straight from some lake in the lower regions of hell runs out and down my hand, arm and feet. There are smiling people standing around and working a few meters away, so I just smile. When I was a kid I had to clean out a full sized freezer that had become completely infested with maggots. I would have to say that this was at least equal, if not one small degree worse. I have nothing to wipe my hand on exept.. well, me. I leave it and just treat my arm as though it were prosthetic and purely for decoration. My arm would have won a living statue competition.
So, barracade cleared, we go on to the little village. The houses here are traditional wooden ones like in the countryside, built on stilts and with no glass in the windows, just shutters or fabric. People live in the areas under the houses as well. So does our patient. She's lying on the platform bed, just under the house with several people around her. She's not moving, so it almost seems like she's dead or dying. Nader speaks pretty decent Khmer, so he talks to the family and determines that she was knocked down by a motorcycle and hit her head. They say she went to the doctor. I suppose someone took her there... the people here don't go to doctors unless someone from outside takes them. She had some antibiotics, but we don't think she was taking them correctly... we can't be sure, so Nader tells the family exactly how to take care of her as per the doc's instructions. She also, amazingly, has a folder with her medical file from this visit and x-rays. I'm in the middle of a garbage dump in Phnom Penh where some of the people don't even know there's an outside world ("What's the Mekong River? Is that in America?") and this woman has her x-rays and medical file. She lives under a house. But, awesome! That helps alot. We get some photos so we can send them to a doctor in Germany and get his opinion. Sam thinks she has an adema in her head. We tell the family to contact Nader if it gets worse and we'll find out what we can. She may have to have fluid drained out of her cranium. We say that if this is the case, we'll take care of getting her to the hospital and paying for it, but they have to really watch her and take care of her in the meantime. The other people around tell us they have headaches... everyone at the dump has headaches. Always. I am not surprised. They also mention aches, minor wounds, infections, etc... We tell them we don't have anything with us, so Sam and Nader give them advice and tell them that we'll be back every now and then and that they should come see us when we're there. They thank us and smile. I ask Sam quietly if I can ask them to use their water to clean my hand. He says to just do it and they won't mind at all. I've had toxic-claw for almost 30 minutes now and I'm worrying about infection. Heh... Ha, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH.... ahhhh... hah.
So, we say our goodbyes and head back out to civilisation. 5 blocks away.
Sam and I head back to the children's home and Nader heads back to Aziza's Place. Sam and I stop on the way home and get beer. Many beer. We drink, chainsmoke, and watch a movie that night... I can't remember what it was. I think it was a comedy, but it was certainly something light. Again, although I am only posting this now, this was day 3 of my visit here. I was pretty off balance...
Sam has been back once and I haven't been back yet. I say yet because Nader and I have been trying for days to get out there and work on the clinic, but it's been raining every day, like it is right now, and we can't paint or even drive in there when it's pouring rain. We're supposed to be there right now. Tomorrow is my last full day here, as I leave at 11 am on Monday, the day after tomorrow. There are so many projects that all of them suffer. I really don't like that. I don't like it a bit. But, we had a meeting with Nader, Sam, Anne, a doctor whose name I have forgotten so well calll him Gerhardt (he's a Khmer who speaks almost perfect German)n a medical student named Chey who's going to be our main guy at the clinic, and myself. We talked for about 2 hours and got things in order so that we can really start operating the clinic by the end of this month. We'll see what this weird reality does to help us or hinder us.
I have no idea what's going on with the woman we saw who had the accident. I'm sure Nader knows. I'll ask him next time I talk to him and I'll post her status here.