Pockets of hope in Phnom Penh

22 March 2010

Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh is a bustling Southeast Asian city. Motorbikes and tuk-tuks crowd the streets, weaving in and out of the busy traffic. The streets are lined with shops and food vendors, and the air is thick with smog and pollution.

A new partnership
This is my first visit to Cambodia YMCA, which is a new partner for Y Care International. They are an emerging organisation, founded in 1999, as nearly three decades of brutal civil war came to end in Cambodia. We started supporting them in 2009 to help young people who are forced to work on the streets of Phnom Penh – one of the most dangerous cities in the world.

The work focuses on young people aged between 12 and 17 who live in slum communities. These tend to be small strips of land sandwiched between suburban houses, but the government is trying to move all the slums to the outskirts of the city, away from the eyes of western tourists.

I was taken to a slum which has been built dangerously close to a railway line. There were huge piles of rubbish at one end of the slum; the only place where people could deposit their household waste. The houses were wooden shacks, big enough for barely one person, yet home to at least six. These shacks cost each family $10 (£6.70) a month in rent — a huge strain on the finances of a family with so many mouths to feed.

Working on the streets
Rather than being in school like most teenagers, these young people spend their days selling flowers on the streets or at the city’s rubbish dumps. They collect scraps of plastic and metal, which are sold for measly sums of money to recycling companies. There are about 17,000 street children in Phnom Penh alone. On average, when children get to seven years old, they usually start working 8-10 hours a day to help their families who desperately need money just to put food on the table.

Many of the children and young people I met look much younger than they are because they are malnourished. Some told me that they drink a lot of water at bedtime so they can trick themselves into feeling full enough to sleep.

Children growing up in the slums are unlikely to have any kind of education and usually can’t read or write. Because government teachers are paid so little, children have to pay their teachers each day to be able to attend classes. On top of this, costs such as transportation, uniforms and books make it impossible for a family to send their children to school.

The YMCA is providing these children and young people with an education outside of the school system. They have two trained teachers who run classes in Khmer and English. A volunteer also provides a hot nutritious meal each day. A counsellor runs life skills sessions where young people can talk about the challenges they face and how to cope with them. They live in a world where it is easy for them to be exploited by adults – they face dangers such as violence, disease, the threat of trafficking or being forced into the sex trade. By talking through these difficult issues, the YMCA can prevent young people from getting into dangerous situations.

Changing hearts and minds
When the work first started, the young beneficiaries were coming to the YMCA centre to attend classes – but as they were coming from all over the city, many of them had to walk 5-6km, then take a tuk-tuk to get there.

So the YMCA has changed its way of working. They are now running the project in the slum communities. The staff hope that this will mean the YMCA is more visible, and they plan to set up support groups for parents to get them more involved in running the project. But the staff are not naïve; they know that things won’t change overnight. It’s hard to get ‘buy in’ from parents who see the time their children spend in classrooms as taking away a vital income on which they rely. Changing hearts and minds in the communities will take time and considerable determination and — whilst the YMCA has this in abundance — this is only the beginning of a long and arduous journey.

By Sara Fowler
A version of this article appeared in our Insight Magazine, March 2010.