Noone should live like this

Easter always comes in the midst of the new growth of spring. Who could not feel more hopeful with the arrival of lighter mornings and longer days? The world seems to wake up a little as it shakes off the cold of winter: the birds return to sing in the trees and the blossom breaks out in cheerful pinks and bright whites.

A sense of renewal and new life flourishes in gardens and hedgerows across the country, just as it is found in the Easter services which celebrate the wondrous Resurrection of Christ. Families get together to share meals and excited children hunt for chocolate eggs hidden about the houses. There is a lot to celebrate at this time and a lot to be thankful for.

There are many hundreds of children in Cambodia who will spend this Easter (and every day of every year) hunting and searching, not for the delights of Easter eggs, but for rubbish to recycle and old shoes to repair. Hundreds of families, fathers, mothers, grandparents and children of all ages, spend their lives desperately scouring the rubbish dumps of Phnom Penh in search of the next piece of refuse that they can sell for a few pennies.

One such worker is ten-year-old Marie. Marie lives with her family on the edge of the dump in a shack made of poles and metal sheets. Day in, day out, they go out onto the steaming heaps, collecting rubbish to sell on. Her family want to move far away from the dangers and the stench of the mountains of trash.

Life in a dumpsite shack is not only filthy, but cold. The rubbish may be often on fire, but that does not mean the shacks are warm. With no decent insulation of any kind, the families are at the mercy of the seasons. Colds easily turn into illness, sickness and then death. Marie and her family have no access to decent sanitation or running water, which makes keeping clean and staying healthy a battle that must be fought every day. Every time Marie drinks, she risks illness and infection from the dirty water that is the family’s only source.

As Marie searches through the dirt, she dreams of going to school, but for all the children on the dumpsite such dreams are sheer fantasy. She knows that other children who do not live on the tip are able to enjoy the tremendous privilege of getting an education. They can look forward to a bright future of hope for a better future; Marie can’t. She has got so used to walking on cut feet that she doesn’t cry about that anymore. But she cries about missing out on school.

She would dearly love to escape the fumes and dangers of the dump. The tip is her home, her playground and her workplace.

In this place there is little to hope for and many dangers to avoid. Late at night, small children are crushed by rubbish trucks whose drivers cannot see them in the gloom. When it rains, the dump site turns into a swamp that sucks any careless workers down into the filth.

The families on the rubbish dump came to be trapped there through a number of ways: debt, sickness, the loss of the principal breadwinner, coming to the city to escape rural poverty or through loss of employment. Others came to the city with high aspirations which were crushed under many disappointments.

Habitat for Humanity is working with the communities of the Phnom Penh dump sites. We have helped them design their own solutions to these terrible problems and, with our encouragement and expertise, they are looking forward to starting a new life away from the dump site. This community of able and motivated people, who are trapped in an horrific situation, are eager to work their way out of poverty. Habitat for Humanity is working to provide the tools, materials and expertise to make their dreams come true.

It is very important that community should not be separated but will stay together in the homes they helped design. Their children will be educated together thanks to Habitat for Humanity’s partnership with the local charity, Pour un Sourire d’Enfant. The new homes will be situated near sources of employment, meaning that the families need never go back to the dumpsite again.