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Nearly all the children at CCH lived and worked at Steung Meanchey before coming to CCH.

Steung Meanchey Municipal Waste Dump is located in southern Phnom Penh, in a district of the city of the same name, Steung Meanchey. It is a part of the city with low-income neighborhoods and slums. The dump itself covers about 6 hectares ( a hectare is 2 1/2 acres, approximately). It is flanked by private property on which rubbish pickers build makeshift huts and are charged extortionate rents by landowners. Roughly 2,000 people, about 600 of which are children, live and work there.

It is nicknamed “Smoky Mountain” because of the miasma of smoke that the dump constantly gives off. It is literally on fire; the waste creates methane as it rots and the methane burns. In monsoon season and throughout much of the rest of the year, the surrounding area is swamped and the children live and play in fetid water.

 
Most of the rubbish pickers at Steung Meanchey are either from Phnom Penh or came to Phnom Penh looking for work and ended up in the slums. Many of the approximately 600 children have parents or relatives who also work on the dump and look after them. Some of them go to school, but most do not - at least not on a regular basis -, and it is safe to say that virtually none of them ever completes a primary school education. The school fees are too high and their families need them to collect rubbish to contribute to the family income. Adults earn, on average, 4000 to 6000 riels (US$1.00 to $1.50) a day; children earn on average about half that amount. A whole family working together can actually earn more money than they could in the rural village from which they originally came.
The first criterion of selecting a child for CCH is that the child has no adult guardian capable of looking after them, whether a parent, relative or other adult.

The social ills which create circumstances like those of the garbage pickers are numerous: chronic poverty, debt, poor health due to poor sanitation and lack of access to clean water, landlessness, low land productivity, natural disasters, lack of capital, high unemployment, poor skills and low levels of education, a torn social fabric which is the product of the Khmer Rouge genocide and subsequent on-going civil war lasting right up to 1997.

CCH 1 and 2 are located about three kilometers from the landfill, in the same part of the city, Steung Meanchey. The dirt road to the landfill is flanked by garbage recyclers, to whom the rubbish pickers sell their rubbish.

If you would like more information about Steung Meanchey Municipal Waste Dump, see the presentations in the "CCH Articles, Videos and Links" section.