The slums in Phnom Penh hide well. Squeezed among layers of developed land, it sometimes takes an eagle eye to spot the hidden hole that leads to a self-built community imposed to live in ragged conditions. One such community dwells by the Mekong River. You wouldn’t know it existed unless someone showed you.
I first visited this community back in October, but when I came back this trip around, the picture had slightly different markings. In October, the rains flooded the area, and I was forced to walk across frail, tall, wooden planks that connected homes, always careful to avoid plunging. This month, though, the water dried and I freely roamed the ground.
Walking through this community you hear wonder stories. One family – that’s five people – dwells on a raft idly floating under their roof during the flood season. Another begged a favor from a neighbor to cut the umbilical cord of their newborn after they self-delivered. One more was on the verge of having their home drown in a landslide. Sometimes, the conditions these people live under makes you wonder how they manage. Because one striking characteristic common among slums is how depressing they can be.
Slums, by definition, are made of people who have no home. Typically they have no entitlement to the land they sit on and can be evicted at moment’s notice. In other words, they are a displaced community within a wider functioning society.
After several visits to these communities, a stringing thread seemed to connect them: trash. One particular visit I witnessed a mother meticulously sweeping garbage out from her home into the puddles out front. “People don’t often care about the wider effect trash has on the rest of the community, as long as it’s not in their space”, one NGO’s program manager mentioned. Indeed, trash accumulated everywhere, eventually floating into craters of water.
Unkempt trash leads to disease, disease leads to debilitation, debilitation leads to ineffectiveness, ineffectiveness leads to poverty.
But this then begs the question why such apathy exists? Why in some places people have a can-do attitude while others repeatedly adhere to “it’s not my problem”? “Ownership”. That’s the word I remember Jack Sim, founder of WTO (World Toilet Organization), enthusiastically expounding on during his talk at Social iCon.
When it comes to ownership, though, the slum communities don’t have it. Home means nothing. They’ve already been stripped. Perhaps the trash endemic is a metaphor for their predicament.
I walked out the slums. A gated mansion towered over. Parked outside was a Benz. A Lexus swooped by. What then was that a metaphor of?
In this research trip to Cambodia, Phnom Penh has been very rewarding. I learned about the local culture while meeting some 
