CCH Children Come from Poverty...
Nearly all the children at CCH lived and worked at Steung Meanchey garbage dump before coming to CCH.
Steung Meanchey Municipal Waste Dump was located in southern Phnom Penh, in a district of the city of the same name, Steung Meanchey. In 2009, the dump was closed, but the conditions of poverty in Cambodia have not been alleviated, so that the net effect of the dump closing will most likely not be positive.
In any event, nearly all of the children now at CCH lived and worked at one time at Steung Meanchey dump. It was a part of the city with low-income neighborhoods and slums. Covering about 6 hectares (a hectare is 2 1/2 acres, approximately), it was flanked by private property on which rubbish pickers built makeshift huts and were charged extortionate rents by landowners. Many of the shacks and slums remain, though the dump, as a source of livelihood, is gone.
The dump was nicknamed “Smoky Mountain†because of the miasma of smoke that the it constantly gave off. It was literally on fire; the waste created methane as it rotted and the methane burned. In monsoon season and throughout much of the rest of the year, the surrounding area was swamped. Children still live and play in the fetid water.
Most of the rubbish pickers at Steung Meanchey were either from Phnom Penh or came to Phnom Penh looking for work and ended up in the slums. Some of the children went to school, but most did not - at least not on a regular basis, and it is safe to say that virtually none of them ever completed a primary school education. The continuing poverty still renders school fees too high for poor families.
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 1998.
CCH 1, 2 and 3 are located about three kilometers from the former landfill, in the same part of the city, Steung Meanchey.