My Journey into the world of Phnom Pehn Homelessness, Poverty and Hope

We’re all outsiders in a way, in some ways, at some times – but some more than others. Some people rarely outside, and others rarely allowed in. Now I’m totally on the outside, with the other outsiders, but it wasn’t always like this. Yes, I was born outside, but there was a brief time, like a winter flowering, when I was within. Not just a part of something, but positively blossoming within.

My arrival in Phnom Pehn as an NGO teacher

When I first came to Phnom Pehn I was a regular teacher. My experience of poverty was as a unintentional voyuer. As part of the introduction to the city, the NGO school I’d signed up for took us out for a day to show us where all the sights were, at that time supermarkets were rare so we had to be shown that, and we walked through the rough areas with a monologue warning about bag snatching and not trusting anyone. We ended up in this dodgy area on the edge of the slum where you could have a drink and watch the comings and goings and the main interest was in the people-watching, watching people who were very different to you but in no way interacting with them.

It sounds awful and in a way it is, but the NGO I was with focused on poverty reduction. It was something truely unique and I arrived at it’s heyday, stayed for the three years and saw it disintegrate. I had just finished a mature degree and wanted a recent reference for future job searching and so signed up for a three month term in a school where volunteer teachers get free accommodation and training and students get subsidized studies, much cheaper than other schools. Profits were donated to an NGO in the province that focused on poverty reduction and sustainable living. All non-teacher staff were illiterate local people who were given free English lessons and evening university classes, would leave after a few years to a much better job and a new wave of staff taken on. It really was one of the best social enterprise models that can be imagined, I know it changed my life and many others. I’d spent most of my life recovering from a hellish childhood and was socially phobic to the point that I hadn’t really lived life and it was here, at this school, surrounded by the kindness and patience of the local staff and students, that (in middle age) I finally got over myself and my life began… for a time.

Of course, personal greed had to tear it apart. One day, after three years sor so, the Khmer manager told me there was a plan to open another school in Toul Kork, take on more teachers and pay them, plus open childrens’ classes. Many of the other local staff rebelled and I didn’t understand why, but essentially, after much drama, the real dasterdly plan was revealed. It was made into a private company, public accounts showing profits being donated were no longer public, rather than paying teachers, teachers had to pay to intern, subsidized prices for students disappeared… as did the students. Within a year it was collapsing.

My introduction to the marginalized populations of Phnom Pehn

That last year, they switched me to weekend daywork and nights working in the north of the city at the state water company, teaching employees English. I got a room in the cheapest part of town and very occasionally, perhaps once a month, would walk past the slum and people-watch for the spectacle. I taught alone in both roles and so was pretty lonely. There were a few of the same characters that seemed to always be around there and stood out to me. They were ‘other’ then, people on the outside (shadows). I would sit there aloof, in my tie and white shirt. There was a bistro in the area run by this tattoo covered old, unsmiling French guy who, for some reason, made me think of a keyholder in a medieval jail.

There was one very old guy, I heard him talking once and clocked him as German. He stayed in my mind, frankly because of his absurdity. He had ‘everywhere’ hair, like Einstein, bow legs, stooped over and bent almost double, and dressed all in white, but crumpled, dusty white with clothes that looked home-made. He was often with a very young, dazed looking American and he was telling him off for being in a bad situation.

There were only three other people I would see constantly. Two of them were ‘clippers’ as I call them. Older women who walk around offering to clip mails and massage feet for a dollar. I was very reserved (a step away from full social phobia) at that point and found the physicality far too intimidating and would shoo them away. I wanted, then, to watch, not interact. The other woman was younger and stuck out to me because she seemed to have some spasticity of movement, and I wondered how she got by in life and how she earned money.

That is all I recall from the few times I passed by as a teacher. I wasn’t a teacher much longer. The school collapsed. I lined up a job in China and it fell through, and volunteered in a community movie house cooperative, supporting the local arts scene. My last relative died and I received some money. At the cinema I had a community-house to live in, friends and contacts and there was no need to go and people-watch the ‘other’ people rather than go home to a dingy shoebox room. I was OK.

Realizing that *I* am also marginalized

But was I really? I was always ‘other’ myself, and I didn’t know. This is what I know now. I am on the outside. I used to go and look at the people who are even on the outside of the most impoverished situation, and they were other. But I did this cinema for three years, and no one stayed as long as me as they had something else to go to and I never found paid work again as a teacher. Maybe I don’t have the personality, but really it’s that I have the wrong look.

Things started to fall apart a while before covid. I have long-term health issues. They got worse and I ended up going to the state hospital where I was diagnosed with bone-on-bone hip arthritis. I was told to get more tests as there were other things wrong and prepare for surgery. I’d gone to KL and was scheduled to go back after six months, but never made it…

So I was on a break in Kampot and saw on the news there was this virus and they were going to close the border and it was a huge deal but no one really thought that it was going to last for years. The cinema went bust and I ended up in such a strange situation. All the tourists left and I found an old Chinese business hotel on it’s last legs and got a palatial room for a few dollars, fit for a king, though it was a prison as well as we weren’t allowed out the hotel for long periods.

The insanity of covid forever embedded me into marginalized lives, as … we’re all outside

The only place open, illegally, was a backroom in this old area. There was no one around that I knew. To start with I’d just sit and watch the spectacle, a darkened backroom crammed full of the cities’ poorest people, and penniless tourists who were normal middle-class travelers a month ago before their strandings. There were people openly smoking meth pipes, violent beatings from moneychangers, generally women beating other women senseless in the street for not paying, emotionally pent-up foreigners starting at least one fight a day, homeless children begging, homeless old people begging, homeless disabled people begging, but all the same people just sitting around together and eventually talking as there was nothing else to do.

The sad reality of meth (ice) abuse in Phnom Pehn

The first real contact was with Annette, the clipper. I stopped pushing her away and took the manicure and massage. She was old, spoke no English, had a kind of flat, nut-shaped face that only ethnic Khmer seem to have. She was long-term homeless and insane to some degree. She was talking and calling to invisible people that only she could see, but that was pretty common. Maybe ten percent of the locals around there do this, either as a result of meth or sometimes as a personality trait. I didn’t know back then, I was so green! I met Western people who started doing the same thing after a while, as a side-effect of meth use. It can be temporary, or in the case of Annette, it becomes permanent. We were all so isolated at that time, I got used to her, the smell of meth around people, around her, it’s distinctiveness mixed with the smell of her homelessness, and the shouting. I got used to all this and she became the main part of my day.

Every day I would get up and go to find Annette, one dollar massage, then sit in the street, which was allowed by then, and hang around with Annette and whoever she was with all day. Every time a food vendor came by, I had to get something, like a dollar bit of fruit or a fifty cents couple of eggs. And she sat with me babbling to herself, and all the people she knows would stop by in passing and join us when we had a little food. Some days the illness would get the better of her and she’d sit alone shouting and screaming at whatever inner-demons were tormenting her, and then she’d recover and come back. I just got calm and used to all that and I thought she’d be there forever.

I got to know the who community at that time, everyone. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was actually the high-point of my life. Maybe because I was always on the outside myself for reasons even now I don’t fully understand, but I found a community of forgotten people and felt that I had actual friends. It was mainly because of Annette, when she wasn’t having a bad day she was smiley and a people-magnet. I got close to one woman and was kind of in a relationship for the first time in a long time. I joined a local comedy group and weekly was doing stand up, so I had a load of new western friends. My health was great, I essentially had few symptoms.

The crazy old guy with the Einstein hair became a good friend. Things improved after a year or so and the stranded foreigners started leaving. There were a few perennial foreigners who are still there now and totally forgotten by the world. They are fully accepted by the local impoverished population but in some ways they have it worse as there are no resources for them, only hate from their own people, and a consensus that their situation is their own fault. I don’t fully know their story, I know dribs and drabs, but I want to put it here. I want to know all the stories.

One day I was hanging around all day for Annette but I didn’t see her. She had been under the weather so I thought she’d be sleeping somewhere. As I was leaving one night, someone came and told me she had died in the morning, but no one knew what of. No one was even sure.

Homeless and undocumented, life is very cheap

I fell apart when I heard this. I went and sat by the river, but for the next week it was awful because no one knew what had happened for certain. There were people who told me she was OK, and people said she was in a hospital and coming back. Others said she’d died in the street. I kept looking and one day I found her bag. It was a little plastic bag, with cheap jewelry she’d find and try and fix, and bits of cardboard she would collect and practice drawing. She always had it, and when I found it lying in the road in one of the places she slept, I knew she had gone. It was insane. I had only been learning the language for a while, could barely communicate with her, knew almost nothing about her, but I thought she would always be there and I could always just come and hang out and she would be around and I’ve never had a friend like that.

No one cared. Life is so cheap. People tell me she used to be functional, working, had a boyfriend and a son that she’d lost touch with. She told me in Khmer that she had a mother who lived near the airport but I don’t know if anyone knew where she was or what had happened. There is no record and no papers and if someone like her son ever wants to know, then she’s totally invisible, as though she never existed.

Things fell apart after that. My ‘kind of’ relationship ended. A friend I met, Jason, died of AIDS complications. The palatial hotel was taken over by Bangladeshi’s and I ended up sleeping on the floor in the cheapest hovel in town. The few investments I had tanked and I lost most of my money. I ended up hating comedy. I had been trained that, you always have to address the elephant in the room or people feel uncomfortable. If there’s something wrong with you you have to make people laugh about it. I had found out from the comedy workshops, that I have a sinister look about me, I look like I’ve stepped out of a horror film (partly due to illness) and so my rant style of comedy is about looking weird and scary and always being the outside, but I didn’t find that funny now. I didn’t feel like laughing. I can’t put my finger on it but I didn’t feel equal to the expat crowd I was performing to, I felt like the outsider. My health deteriorated. I haven’t seen any doctor, but I can tell it’s both hips now. I can’t sleep on a mattress, only the floor. I can only sit on hard chairs. My feet are discolouring and I can see I have artery disease. I only take self-prescribed natural medicine because, frankly, I don’t care about me anymore.

Lacking social safety nets in Phnom Pehn.

More friends died. Sometimes it was only mentioned in passing, like Aya, who just died in a guesthouse but no one knew what had happened. Other times I was closer and involved. Like Srei Mao. My friend messaged me that she was sitting in a bar crying as she was ill and I went to find her and I got there late. She was in the darkness and she said, ‘I’ve got cancer’. She kind of whispered it, with wild, wide eyes, like she didn’t believe it. I’d known her ages. This was August. Just a few months before on Christmas day, she’d given me a bracelet she made herself, and when she couldn’t find my favourite colour, she’d hand-painted them for me. Eight months later, she’s there alone in the darkness.

Well I was able to contact a mutual friend who agreed to pay for treatment. He turned up with a few hundred dollars. I was so grateful to him and felt that I’d been able to make some positive difference this way. She went to the province to spend time recovering, but then her husband came to me, just a month later, and told me that she’d died.

She’d had just an awful life. Again, completely invisible, forgotten, although it exists in my mind. There are these desperate, other lives that are unshared and unseen I don’t know how to explain my feelings.

The Catalyst – a missing homeless child in Phnom Pehn

About a year later, I have a good friend Nari. She was long-term sleeping out in street 172. She always has her children with her, a boy and girl, and I noticed the boy was missing and I asked after him and I thought that she told me someone was looking after him. Each time I saw her after that he wasn’t there and one day, a couple of weeks later, assuming he was in the province with grandparents or something, I pressed the issue and found out that he was completely missing. He’d just disappeared one night. He is around four years old.

She hasn’t told anyone and refused to go to the police because she said she’s a nobody and no one will care. I asked on the expatriate groups what to do and was completely attacked, as a stupid tourist falling for a scam, and why hasn’t she gone to the police etc etc.

I checked my camera and I had one short video I’d taken of the three of them in the street. When I showed her she asked for a copy so she could ask around. I said OK but then we go to the police. She agreed.

Next day I took her to the police, who passed her on to another station. We went to another station and they took a photo off me, wrote my phone number on the back. That was it. Over in 60 seconds. No crime number, no record taken. This is what happens when a four year old goes missing.

Well one helpful expat recommended going to Child Protection Services, which I did. Then things completely changed. They came straight over, spent the day interviewing her, actually gave me a crime number. I got more pictures printed for her to hand out.

I needed a break as it had emotionally exhausted me. I booked a break in Kampot. The night before I went looking for her and found her at 10pm lying in the street with her daughter sheltered behind a big umbrella. I gave her the pictures. She suddenly grabbed me and pressed her face into my chest and said, ‘I miss him so much’. She’d never shown emotion before. I had to walk away it was so intense.

That night I fell asleep on the floor in my dim room. I woke up and had an Out of Body Experience, i.e. my ghost sat up straight while my body was asleep in bed. After a time Nari floated in and was beside me and held me in the darkness and she whispered, ‘Why did he have to go?’. There was a feeling, an ominous, heavy, over-powering feeling.

I left. I had the break. I stayed away from everything, but something had changed at that point. I could feel it. This is just some new path for me that either leads to change or doom for me, but I don’t care. There was no going back.