The idea for this project was essentially born from the events of Covid. Before this, I had been teaching in Cambodia for years, was finishing a PGCert in Linguistics, and was working in a local cinema when my school folded. I did the cinema for a few years and was diagnosed with (among other things) hip arthritis. I was finding the job a bit of a struggle, but then one day I was taking a short break in nearby Kampot and there was talk all over social media of a virus spreading worldwide and flights being cancelled an instructions from the embassy to ‘shelter in place’.

What this essentially meant in Phnom Pehn was nearly every foreigner leaving, the cinema going bust, the whole country falling apart financially and me being trapped in a hotel room, not allowed out. Everyone I knew left and at one point the isolation was extreme. There were squads of police riding around in gangs randomly hitting men who were out (even though an hours exercise a day was allowed).

Well I stayed in and alone as long as I could take it, and eventually started venturing out into the deserted streets. Everywhere was closed and boarded up. The best I could find was a hotel reception that had a little shop in the foyer, and in the back of it a public bench I could go and sit on each day just so I was outside.

One day I was walking there through a dark backstreet and I was passing the back of a property and the door had a glass partition and looking through I saw movement, and when I peered inside I saw a dark, gloomy bar packed full, around half foreigner and half local. Remember, this was a time when everything was closed by law and the city was a ghost town, and so this was a bit of a shock, so I went in and sat down and it turned out to be a place, flouting the law, but essentially open for business behind closed doors.

What happened over the next few months is unique, a situation that never happened before nor will happen again. There were so many stranded foreigners at that time, some of them were middle-class people just caught up in it all who would never be in a situation like this otherwise. The bar itself was opposite what is essentially a slum, so the local people who were piled in were from here and the atmosphere was strange to say the least, people were couped up and wound up. There were fights most days between various factors.

Very slowly things got back to the new normal, and a new community was forged. We were all just hanging around by then in an open courtyard. Sometimes there would be a crackdown and we had to go back inside, but essentially this was it. I ended up hanging out with the people from the area opposite, made new close friends, as flights resumed many of the foreigners started drifting away back home.

My new circle of local friends were from the lowest strata of Khmer society. A few of them were literally living in the bar, i.e. sleeping in chairs in the evening and just hanging around in the daytimes. Many of them have no ID at all, are illiterate in any language, are regular methamphetamine users, are physically disabled or psychotic. Basically a community of societies forgotten.

Over the course of the pandemic, a few friendships had run deep and foreigners returning home made a commitment to help financially. Because I was staying and generally reliable, I ended up being the one to receive and distribute occasional Western Union transfers (sent in my name because the recipient had no ID), then when it was picked up, I would post the sender a short video from the bank of me picking up the money, giving it to the recipient (holding the bills to confirm the amount) and then the recipients verbally confirming I had given it to them.

I was really happy doing this, for a number of reasons. One is that the recipients were also my friends and I was glad to help them and have this sense of meaning and that I was making a difference in the world. The other is that by that time I understood just how much they needed the money. Many of the people I now considered my close friends literally had nothing in the world bar the clothes that they were wearing, not a penny on them and no official papers, nor could they get any.

Somehow in this situation, poverty and desperation become a collective. We sat around and everything is shared. Someone has some food and it belongs to everyone. I’m not rich but I’ve never been penniless When the ladies walked around selling cold noodles or cooked eggs and the like, I’d get some and it was everyone’s, but that worked both ways. I’d be fed daily by people who had nothing.

The friendship and community is really the only consolation of what is a very grim situation. Since I fell into this community, four people close to me have died, the average age perhaps thirty. Life is very cheap here. There is a lot of violence, mainly from the money-lenders, who tend to be female and incredibly violent. I’ve seen young women beaten unconscious in the street.

As the covid period started to end, much of the area was demolished for luxury development. The foreigners who remained went back to their expat bubble and jobs but I stayed connected to the new community I met, largely because my health was suffering and I couldn’t find work. I got into public speaking and stand-up comedy for a few years, giving up as my health deteriorated. I started a website based on my open spiritual practice and human potential interests, Buddhism, hypnosis, meditation with the idea of building it up as an info product business.

As all the open spaces near the slum pretty much closed, the community moved into the street. There was one street where the totally homeless people built little shacks and lived in in the street, and then in the parallel street, the people with better housing options kind of just assemble sometimes and hang out in the road. It’s a little seedy and unsafe and my friends are worried when I turn up to join them, but this is just how things are now as most people I know can’t even afford a tea or coffee or something to relax in a legitimate place, this is just where we meet. I can’t go often because I end up giving some cash here and there and simply don’t have enough. I live on an inheritance I received just before Covid which pays me 900 usd a month. I sleep on the floor in a single room and pay 35usd a week. Whatever I have now I give to people. I don’t go out anywhere.

There was one good friend I had, Nari, I’ll tell her story elsewhere, but she was sleeping on the floor with two young children in the street and we’d always have a chat. Her boy was three and the girl one. I noticed one day the boy wasn’t with her and asked and thought she was telling me that a friend was looking after him.

After a couple of weeks of not seeing him I asked again and slowly came to realise that she was saying that she *hopes* some homeless person is looking after him, he’s actually completely missing and has been for two weeks and she has no idea where he is. She wouldn’t go to the police so I asked the expats online what to do and was totally flamed, many people told me she was a scammer, talked to me like I’d only just arrived totally flamed, many people told me she was a scammer, talked to me like I’d only just arrived.

I ended up taking her to two police stations. By then I thought I’d seen everything but was shocked because they wouldn’t even let her report it, just discussed it for a minute and took the only picture that exists of him, something on my phone they posed for me before. But no paperwork.

Eventually I got the child protection unit involved, and it was properly reported and investigated. I had some pictures made to hand out and put up. The mother was still sleeping in the street and finally broke down one night and we sat crying together. I couldn’t sleep and kept having nightmares. One night, the culmination was an OBE where I came out my body and sat on the edge of the bed in the darkness. Nari joined me and held on to me and whispered to me, ‘Why did he have to go?’. There was an awful, ominous atmosphere, in the darkness. It had become a literal waking nightmare. I had to move away to Kampot for a while as I simply couldn’t take it.

But something’s happened to me now. I can’t go back to life as it was. I can’t really explain it because, I don’t understand fully myself. My health isn’t good, I’m pretty sure I need both hips replaced at this point, plus my back constantly hurts. I sleep on a hard floor rather than a bed or I can’t walk and I can only sit in certain chairs, so it really affects me. Pretty sure I have artery disease and probably need stenting. None of this is going to happen as I don’t have the money for it. I have no family in Europe now, and so I kind of gave up on myself in some way.

Although perhaps gave up is the wrong word, I more felt a sense of surrender. This is just my situation. I have nothing except this community I ended up a part of. So I decided to give myself to it. The thing with Nari (the mother) is that I realized how invisible everyone is. There are these complex, forgotten, unheard stories and the forgotten people have no phone, and are rarely literacy, cannot chronicle themselves and make themselves heard. It was driven home when a three year old went missing and no one cares at all. People don’t care about the other. The dirty, insane, uneducated, old, or whatever. We’re all other, forgotten voices.

There are things that go on here, to ‘help’, (NGOs and state initiatives) and I think some of it is effective and much of it not, but the main thing is, no one is inside of this, seeing and living these stories. People are all wrapped up in their own stories and I think if, not as statistics, but if these lives were told as narratives to the world, people would reach out. I don’t know. Like with Kresar (the missing boy) – no one on the outside of the community was close enough to know that something was wrong, and no one on the inside had the knowledge or resources to do anything and the people close around (in Cambodia) don’t want to hear the other voices and if these voices were louder, global, accessible – I think there might be a global humanity they, we, can join. I don’t know. I’m just trying to work out what I’m going to carry on and even live myself for.

That’s enough for now. I’ll explain myself more if things work out.