THE MUNICIPAL DUMP

14 Nov 2004

Great farewell party last Saturday night on a teakwood house floating on the Mekong: I went to bed at 4h15AM … my alarm clock rang at 5h30AM. Quite a short night! I wanted to accompany a friend who regularly goes to the municipal dump of Phnom Penh from 6h30 to 8h30 to assist the team of local volunteers who provide daily food and nurse services to about 700 children of the area (with the N.G.O. “ Pour Un Sourire d´Enfant”). The children are asked to take a shower before they can get a plate of rice with some pieces of vegetables and meet. It is most likely their only meal of the day. We sit on a bench, 2 or 3 girls stand a meter away from us, staring at us. After a minute, they suddenly jump on our laps, holding our arms and cuddling us. Big smiles and shiny looks under dirty faces. They look like they had the latest “Hawaiian blond” hair dyeing, but in fact their pieces of blond hair is due to malnutrition.
Within a few minutes, one is already asleep on my lap. She probably worked all night on the dump like many others.
In the nursery (an open-air wooden room with a single table as furniture), we start putting disinfectant and bandages on all the wounds that are displayed to us. (I must say that I swiftly realized my severe limitations as a nurse that morning …!) incinérer
Lots of open wounds, burns and infections. Most of them due to the sharp metal sticks used to pick up stuff and by the plastics constantly being cremated on the dump on which the kids walk.
At the horizon, the huge pile of dump where tens of adults and children wearing boots and long clothes to protect themselves from injuries consciously pick up stuff from the junk. One little boy with a Xmas hat decorated with two Mickey ears coming back from a night of hard work is passing by us. Much work is actually done during night shifts from 3PM to 8AM because it is the time when the municipal trucks bring the rubbish form the city. Once their work is finished, they sell their daily bag of collected recyclable dump to a business guy who pay them about 1000 riels: 0,25 $.
On the way back, a small boy is playing with a car that he is pulling with a string, it is a box of hair dyeing Garnier, “Because you worth it”.