The Dump

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THE DUMP. Copyright © 2012 by Peppe Arninge. All rights reserved. Produced in Sweden. No part of this ebook may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations. Texts and photographs: Peppe Arninge English translation: Sheryl and Arnold Shatz Graphic design and art direction: Johan Stiernspetz eBook ISBN no: 978-91-977796-3-0 Publicera Publishing Group Ltd P.O. Box 6105, S-102 32 Stockholm, Sweden Telephone +46 (0)8 31 63 00 www.publicera.com

This book is dedicated to my parents who always believed in my wildest ideas.

Prologue

When I started my photographic journey in Cambodia in the mid-90s, life was extremely difficult for the average Cambodian. Guns, girls and ganja were three words that constantly, yet silently, echoed along the dirty and unpaved alleys of the country’s capital, Phnom Penh. With a corrupt police force and absence of a serious judicial system, large groups of glue sniffing kids as young as ten, could, on a daily basis, without risk of being caught, conduct their dangerous and forbidden trade in unlit doorways. For the rest of the capital’s citizens who believed in honest work, the fight for normalcy in their daily life was a painful and endless struggle. Today, 15 years later, Cambodia is still a country where the depth and beauty of the people and culture are matched only by the depth and enormity of the people’s sufferings. Since the late 70s, hundreds of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid has poured into the country; but, poverty, humiliation and a total absence of human dignity are still present. The reason? Corruption. In fact, the only difference from my first visits in the mid-90s, and now, is that the corruption is somewhat better hidden. This is done to create an impression to tourists, the United Nations and the NGOs, that the humanitarian aid has had a positive impact.

In this photo book I have focused on some of the poorest people on earth - the scavengers at the notorious and toxic Cambodian garbage dumps. Since the end of 2009, the country’s authorities have claimed these landfills do not exist. That is of course a lie. And it makes it more important than ever to repeatedly ask the same question: How can a person in the 21st century justify that thousands of people, many of them children as young as six, live most of their lives on top of landfills that generate more deadly diseases than any other place in the world? The mothers, fathers and children of these garbage dumps far better represent the pride of humanity than any corrupt prime minister. This is their story. Stockholm in December 2011 Peppe Arninge

P H N O M P E N H , C A M B O D I A . A capital and a country. Both so full of life but yet so fragile. It could have been the Paris of the Orient or even Shangri-La, but it isn’t. Instead, years of colonization and war have stigmatized the citizens and turned this nation into a cauldron of turmoil and despair. Cambodians are among the poorest people on the planet yet they are still proud of what’s left of their country which was once seen as a nation with a bright future. Cambodia is a parallel universe filled with tears and laughter. As the country slowly falls apart like a modern Atlantis, the people of this nation only have two honest wishes - to be seen and to be respected. Desperate whispers cut like knives through the hot and moist evening breeze. Typically Cambodian, not loud and blunt, but silent and polite. Close your eyes and listen, and you can probably hear their voices praying for mercy and understanding.

As the caterpillar forces itself through the piles of waste, the scavengers move quickly. The youngest are always in the frontline. At the Cambodian garbage dumps there is only one rule that applies: first come, first served.

It is midday and a young nameless girl takes a rest as the raging heat forces the thermometer up to 110 Fahrenheit. She belongs to a troop of lucky scavengers; she owns a pair of shoes. Most of her friends walk barefoot, up to their waist in piles of glass, scrap metal and rotting food.

“The smell is bearable as long as the sun shines and the area is dry. But in September and October, when the temperature sometimes reaches 110 Farenheit and the rats show up, this place truly is hell on earth.” These words come from a teenage boy at Stung Meanchey, one of two garbage dumps on the outskirts of the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. The boy is one of hundreds of children working long hours, seven days a week. Stung Meanchey is known as one of Asia’s most notorious landfills. The Cambodian authorities claim that the dump closed at the end of 2009. This is not true. The 100 acre landfill still is a disgrace and a catastrophe. It is a place where people die of undiagnosed diseases, toxic smoke and blood poisoning.

“states: Parties shall ensure to the maximum extent possible the survival and development of the child.” The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 6

In the beginning she was like any child - happy and playful and full of curiosity. But something happened. At the age of three she suddenly stopped talking and today she is known as “the girl without a language.” Unfortunately, she isn’t unique. The absence of doctors and proper healthcare forces many deprived families to abandon the well-being of their children.

Stung Meanchey, as well as the newly opened garbage dump close to the infamous Killing Fields, are both places that God has forgotten. A year ago, there were 2,000 adults and young people working side-by-side with rats, dogs and hoards of bothersome flies. After the opening of the new landfill, this number has increased. For the Cambodian scavengers, life has always been an unfair fight for survival along dirty, steep and dangerous hillsides. There is no apparent hope for the future. Death has torn apart many families. It is almost impossible to believe people can survive in such conditions. The estimated life expectancy for males is about 54 years and many of the scavengers will die before the age of 30. Among the children under the age of 15, death rates are very high due to accidents. Some children are run over by garbage trucks and some are crushed under the heavy loads of scrap metal. Tragically, other children disappear into holes or fractures in the burning landfill.

While most scavengers work twelve hour shifts, starting at 6 am, there is a group who specialize in working during the night. One reason is that the heat is less intense; the other is that the dumps are less crowded. Unfortunately, they have to share the piles of waste with both stray dogs and aggressive rats who are disease carriers. Night shift scavenger work is extremely dangerous.

During 2009, medical waste, including used hypodermic needles, increased dramatically in Cambodia. One of the reasons is the illegal import of thousands of tons of this type of garbage from nearby Taiwan and South Korea. Much of the waste arrives during the night to the port in Sihanoukville, a coastal tourist paradise in the south of the country, where it secretly is loaded on trucks and transported to Phnom Penh. After bribing the custom officers, the loading process only takes a few hours. Unfortunately, the medical waste has become a major life threatening problem for the residents of the capital’s dumps. As many of the younger children don’t understand the great danger in handling these contaminated needles, they remove the needles from their protective plastic cases, toss the needles on the ground and drop the plastic cases into their bags. Each case is worth approximately one cent. Much of the medical waste arrives in open boxes, and is spread over a large area, and becomes a direct and deadly threat to anyone stepping on it. Cambodia still is one of the countries in the world with the highest percentage of HIV/AIDS positive inhabitants.

“In America there’s a saying that children should be seen and not heard. In Cambodia, children should not be seen nor heard because you would not survive.” Loung Ung, author of First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers

“states: Parties recognize the right of the child to be protected from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child’s education, or to be harmful to the child’s health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development.” The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 32

In the early morning, usually about 05.30 am, the garbage trucks line up along the watery and muddy roads which lead to the top of the two different landfills. This is where they dump the Cambodian capital’s toxic refuse. The debris consists of scrap metal, rotting food and plastic items. There is no sorting of the 900 tons of daily refuse as it ends up in front of several dozen scavengers that have queued for almost an hour to be the first in line when the green trucks arrive. Others stand on the trucks’ rear wheels to get a head start on the garbage that hasn’t yet had a chance to hit the ground. Once the refuse hits the ground, the crowd quickly lays siege to the fresh pile, attacking it with their homemade picks or bare hands. Plastic containers, bottles and metal objects of all sizes are carefully sorted out before slipping into the scavengers’ bags. These bags are next delivered to a middleman at one of the storage depots at the dumps entrances. The middleman pays the scavenger a meager amount for each full bag. By working from sunrise to sunset, a scavenger can earn an income of about 2,000 Cambodian Riels (US 50 cents) on an average day. This amount, according to the World Bank, is slightly less than what other poor people in Cambodia earn. Recent figures claim that 35% of Cambodia’s population, about 15 million people, live on less than US 75 cents a day.

A few years ago, studies made by prominent experts in the field of toxicology at Japan’s Ehime University, confirmed the existence of dangerous levels of dioxin in the soil as well as in the bodies of garbage dump scavengers. Most affected were the children. The Cambodian Ministry of Environment challenged the study’s conclusions and deemed them flawed because the results contradicted the Ministry’s own results. Chronic cough and runny noses are extremely common among the youngest children working at the Cambodian garbage dumps. All of them suffer from severe headaches and dizziness. It is believed that one of the reasons for these health issues is the toxic smoke created from the trash dumped by the garment factories. This refuse has been dipped in hazardous chemicals before it was sent to the dump.

Clean water is a luxury. Most water used by the residents of the dumps is taken from accumulated puddles of rainwater which has passed through the sediments of the toxic landfills. Due to illiteracy and lack of information, many of the scavengers use the toxic water not only for cooking and washing but also for drinking. There are no pumps close to the residents’ cluster of plywood and tent shacks. Fresh water has to be collected in bottles or plastic containers and carried back to the squatters’ quarters. This job often falls to the youngest children who must walk long distances to reach the pumps.

None of the dumps’ workers can afford medications for their injuries or ailments; instead, they sniff glue. This dangerous habit has become a big problem, especially affecting the youngest generation. A large number of boys, as young as ten, sniff locally produced glue to limit their appetite and escape from the boredom and pain of the injuries they suffer at the landfills.

“states: Parties recognize the right of every child to a standard of living adequate for the child’s physical, mental, spiritual, moral and social development.” The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 27

In 2007, Cambodia was hit by one of the worse outbreaks of Dengue fever in Asian history. More than 38,000 people became ill and 389 died. Many of them were children living on the Stung Meanchey dump. Since Dengue fever has never been an epidemic threat in the United States or Europe, as bird or swine flu was, interest in gaining control over this mosquito-borne disease has never resulted in substantial research funding.

Unconditional humanitarian aid will not solve Cambodia’s poverty but it will ease a donor nation’s guilty conscience and place it higher on the Humanitarian Response Index. This makes the Cambodian people, including the families at the garbage dumps, pawns in a cynical international game in which the children are the biggest losers. By the end of 2009, more than 66 percent of Cambodia’s total income came from humanitarian aid.

Epilogue

After my return to Europe from my last and longest stay in Cambodia, I repeatedly asked “Why, why, why?” Why do we accept that human beings are born on a toxic and deadly garbage dump? Why do we tolerate that children and their parents live their lives on a burning landfill where they must work long shifts and be bitten by rats, dogs and insects in an endless struggle for survival? Why do we consider it acceptable to send enormous amounts of money to a government known for its inconceivable corruption? This is a total mystery to me. Since the fall of the communist Khmer Rouge, one of the cruelest regimes this world has ever seen, humanitarian aid from all over the globe has poured into Cambodia to help its people return to normalcy and rebuild this fragile Asian nation. Unfortunately, the immense generosity of the world’s taxpayers has had an almost imperceptible impact on the country’s development. Many officials within the Cambodian government consider that the money given to their country personally belongs to them. Worse, the United Nations and dozens of Non Government Organizations

(NGO’s) operating in the country, know exactly what is going on but have failed to change the situation. Instead, they act as though everything is running smoothly. They continue to spend unimaginable amounts of money on a range of projects, which are eagerly supported by a government that does whatever it takes to keep the spigot of cash flowing from the global community. As long as the stream of money continues, the present government will remain in power. Today, Cambodia is in a position to benefit every one of its citizens. There is a rapidly growing tourist industry, with beach paradises like Sihanoukville and the world famous Angkor Wat temples in the north. Additionally, enormous reserves of oil and gas have been discovered along Cambodia’s coastline. Unfortunately, by selling the rights to foreign companies that exploit these natural resources, high government officials, including prime minister Hun Sen, have once again favored themselves. Investigations made by international organizations in late 2009, just after the oil and gas contracts were signed, clearly show that foreign bank accounts belonging to members of the Cambodian parliament have been filled with immense sums of money. The same situation applies to the country’s rain forests. As of today (2010) more than one third of the Cambodian forests have been devastated through systematic deforestation, causing massive environmental problems.

It is time for the world to realize that Cambodia is a nation that needs enormous help. Throwing billions of US dollars into the lap of its corrupt political leaders will not bring improvements to the country or its citizenry without first giving the politicians a list of demands that they can and must fulfill. Once the conditions are met, the grants can proceed. By not requiring preconditions, we are abandoning the ones that need us the most - the residents of one of the world’s poorest nations and especially those working at Phnom Penh’s garbage dumps.

Peppe Arninge has been a freelance contract photographer for Scanpix Sweden (AP, AFP, Reuters, DPA and Corbis) since 1998. He also worked under contract with New York-based picture agency WpN between 2005 and 2009. Based in South East Asia, his single pictures and photographic stories have regularly been published in almost every newspaper in Scandinavia. His work has also appeared in a variety of international publications such as The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Mauritius Times, Helsinkin Sanomaat, Bangkok Post, Focus, Sacramento Bee, L’Espresso and Days Japan. The Swedish government, county councils, publishing houses, advertising agencies, commercial buyers and a wide range of web-based news providers and televison stations have showcased his images. His work has also been exhibited at art museums and European photo galleries. Peppe Arninge began his career as a reporter and columnist in Stockholm, Sweden, in the early 1980’s. After working as a correspondent for the Swedish radio, he changed course in the mid 1990’s and became a fulltime photojournalist. He is a graduate of the University of Stockholm and holds degrees from Berghs School of Communications and the Swedish Institute of Film. Johan Stiernspetz has worked as a graphic designer, art director, illustrator and photographer since the early 1980s, specializing in annual reports, advertising and designing logotypes. He was educated at Berghs School of Advertising and Fine Arts and also holds degrees in interaction design and CSS programming. Since the early 1990s, Stiernspetz has owned the design studio Talking Design. He joined Publicera Publishing Group Ltd. in 2008 and is responsible for the company’s complete program of book designs.