Last Saturday Kemsour and Kerry visited a particularly poverty stricken family who were living on a rubbish dump behind the Kantha Bopha hospital area. Their plan was to take the family to the New Hope Farm to show them the house they are offering them, to discuss family sponsorship and how New Hope will fund a small business for them to operate – effectively giving them an entirely new start in life.
The father is sick with heart problems. The four children are illiterate and survive on the money the mother can raise from selling vegetables while walking the streets. Their gorgeous ten-year-old son has never attended school, his family is dependant on the rubbish he collects and sells for a pittance.
This family is one of 30 living in absolute poverty and filth and with countless others, are about to be made homeless as the Government evicts them from the land in order to build tourist-worthy bitumen roads throughout Siem Reap.
The family was not able to visit the New Hope Farm and learn about their windfall, their new chance in life. On arrival to collect them, the father told Kemsour that he had to stay because it was his job to dig a hole to bury a five-year-old girl who had died earlier in the morning of Salmonella – food poisoning from a bad cake. He took them to another slum area, a few streets away which they had not known about, and came across a small funeral comprising a monk praying for the tiny body who was shrouded by a filthy, flimsy towel. Nearby was the tiny girl’s cement-worker mother, abandoned by her husband who ran off with another woman, now left to raise one seven-year-old daughter.
A little way up the path, two men were smashing a piece of wood to pieces to build the little five-year-old a coffin. There was no money for a proper funeral. There was no money for anything.
As Kerry and Kemsour were leaving, an older woman came out to ask whether they could help with a baby that had been dumped at her house the previous day.
We returned on Monday to check on the situation and learned that the beautiful 20-year-old from the country had in desperation, landed on the doorstep of this caring woman with her newborn baby boy, not knowing what to do or where to turn. Initially we thought she'd abandoned the baby but I don't believe she has the strength to keep moving and clearly has nowhere to go. The young mother’s husband had been killed when a truck hit his moto. She had no family of her own. No money. Absolutely nothing but the filthy clothes she was wearing and her new baby. The look of pure grief, exhaustion and desperation on her face was incomprehensible.
I have never, ever seen such sadness and took every single bit of my strength not to crumble in tears there and then in front of her. As we stood there, learning her sad story, a stream of blood trickled down her leg. Why couldn’t this poor woman be in a hygienic, safe, restful environment being looked after by professional health carers instead of lying on a straw mat in the home of someone she didn’t even know, above a mosquito infested, fetid pond, crying tears of grief for her dead husband?
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