Before going to the landfill, my friend Paul took me over to a wonderful, small Cambodian NGO where he volunteers teaching English on Sundays. Its director got a grant from a Japanese foundation to build a center to take some of the kids off the landfill. It is called the Centre for Children's Happiness and the name precisely describes what it is. It houses, feeds, cares for and teaches basic education and vocational skills to 16 orphans who were formerly working on the landfill. Many of their parents died of HIV or cholera during the last epidemic. Some of the kids were actually born in the village outside of the landfill and worked there since they were old enough. Others were from the countryside and ended up there for the same reasons as everyone else. It was their only option besides suicide or starvation. The center, which has only existed for six months, is a beautiful building decorated with the drawings of happy children. Its kitchen and backrooms are spotless. Its dormitories are cozy. Its classroom is filled with the tools of learning. The difference between the center and the landfill is the difference between heaven and hell. The man who started the center is an orphan of the Pol Pot regime himself and he wears his love for these children all over his face. Immediately upon meeting him, you know that that his heart is golden. He beams like a happy Buddha. But then again, how could someone who is responsible for taking kids out of an environment so horrifying and placing them in an environment so loving not be beaming. His children certainly are. Their smiles speak volumes about their gratitude toward this man. As we left, they showered us with gifts of drawings they had done in art class and origami they had made in Japanese class. And of course they all followed us outside and down the block wishing us good luck and happiness. It brought tears of joy from my eyes, something that has not happened to me in recent memory.

Then we went to the place where they came from. A New York Times reporter who Paul was just introduced to asked him to take him over there because he was considering doing a story on it. I was just going along to visit the Centre for Children's Happiness because I'd like the organization I am co-founding - Bridges Across Borders - to cooperate with the center in the future, but since the reporter wanted to go the dump as well, I tagged along (even though I decided to make my previous visit my last one after I stepped on a half decayed rat the size of a cat, which was being devoured by flies). Although I had already been there twice, it was still no less shocking. In fact the more I see this place the more appalled I get.

The road to the landfill is lined with recycling businesses. These are the ones who pay the garbage pickers nominal fees for aluminum cans and plastics. The kids collect them in big rice sacks that they throw over their shoulders, thus their nickname - bag kids. You see them all over the city, but the big goldmine is the landfill. Local NGO workers say that around 5:00 AM - peak time - there are up to 1000 kids picking through the garbage heap. They make between fifty and seventy-five cents a day collecting recyclables.
As you make your way actually into the landfill you are overwhelmed by three things: 1) the smell 2) the flies 3) the horrible sight of all the people, especially the children, whose workplace and home this is. Today I saw a naked child who looked about 2 years old, but could have been older (its hard to tell because they are all malnourished and growth-stunted), sitting on the filthy dirt road that runs through the landfill eating a piece of durian fruit off the ground. His stomach, like nearly every child's stomach in the place, was bulging out - the human body's way of screaming "FEED ME!!!" I shudder to think where that fruit came from.

Most of the very small kids who are all running around outside the landfill in the little shantytown nearby are naked and filthy. Many of the kids working on the landfill have no shoes or flimsy sandals. I saw one girl today wearing shoes that were about ten sizes too big, probably borrowed from her grandmother. I looked down to examine the contents of the garbage that dozens of children around me were stomping in with totally inadequate protection. Amongst all the refuse, I saw a used condom, several syringes, lots of broken glass and sharp metal objects. Then there's the green, gray and black sludge that makes up most of the place, which I assume is what garbage turns into when it sits in a landfill for a while.

The Times reporter had a lot of questions to ask the kids who had gathered around us in curiosity. One 14 year-old boy we talked to had been working there since he was six. He moved to Phnom Penh with his brother from Pursat province after his parents died of HIV, and after a few weeks on the streets they made their way to the dump. The reporter took some pictures of them and wanted to give them some money, but Paul stopped him and warned him of the consequences of that. Evidently Paul had brought some food one time and there was nearly a war over it because he didn't have enough for everyone. On the landfill it is survival of the fittest, and the kids jumped at the food in a manner not unlike the pictures we have seen of the residents of southern Iraq going at the aid shipments that just arrived. Whatever romantic images of poverty I once had are long gone. Poverty - abject poverty like that which I saw today - is nothing short of terror. It makes human beings behave like wild animals. These children are being terrorized by the occupation that poverty has forced upon them. The fact that the well-healed people of the world allow children to grow up in such conditions, well that is criminal.

As we walked back to our car, we saw a young girl doubled over and crying in heap of garbage. Her clothes, which once were white, were as black and filthy as her skin. Our driver asked her what was wrong and she pointed to her stomach. We asked her if she wanted us to take her to a doctor and she said yes, so we took her to the public clinic near the landfill. The doctor there did not appear shocked or saddened, or terribly compassionate for that matter, by the condition of this poor girl. Her sad state is nothing shocking in Steung Meanchey. Without doing any tests or asking her anything, she diagnosed her with diarrhea and gave her a couple injections, which the girl took like a pro with only a few tears. The doctor gave us some oral antibiotics and some rehydration salts. We picked up some clean water for her, filled her little pocket with enough money so that she wouldn't have to work for a couple weeks, and delivered her to the tiny wooden shack, at the foot of a mountain of garbage, that she calls home. We instructed her aunt, who takes care of her, that she is not to work and that she must rest and take the medicine everyday with the water. Who knows if she will actually stay home and take the medicine properly, or if her aunt will try to sell it instead and send her back to work. She promised not to, but I don't have a lot of faith in people who send their children to work in landfills. I'm quite certain of this girl's future. The next place the girls from the landfill usually end up is the nearby brothels, where they are certain to contract HIV, if they haven't already gotten it from stepping on used condoms and syringes at the landfill.