Woman recycling plastic bottles retrieved from trash and hotels in the tourist area of Phnom Penh. She is working in the Royal Palace parking lot.

I have written frequently about the poverty in Cambodia. From the Phnom Penh Post, reporter Steve Finch breaks down the World Bank study.

Cambodia is set to be the country hardest hit this year by the global economic crisis in the Asia-Pacific region, the World Bank said today, placing the Kingdom among only four countries projected “to experience absolute increases in poverty”.

The cost of many things has increased by between 10-25% in the past five months as I have explained before in this log. This has hit the poor the hardest in this country where poverty is everywhere, even where the tourist buses park to disengorge some of the world's wealthiest to see where the single wealthiest family in the country lives.

People have moved from the countryside in search of cash which they believe would help them overcome the overwhelming poverty they knew. But because everything in an urban economy involves a middle man, what cash they can earn is reduced by some wholesaler taking a portion of their retail earnings.






Many older single men have moved from the outer provinces to seek cash, but don't have the skills for the industries here. So they work in the least mechanized fashions they can.

These men pedal cyclos - bicycle rickshaws for a living. In the hottest part of the day they hang hammocks to rest from the heat. At night many sleep in their cyclos.

I failed to mention the poorest of the poor here in Phnom Penh. I ran across a couple of them last night coming home from dinner. It's not recommended that people be out and about any time much after dark here because economic crime is pretty much rampant. But out my housemate, Tashi and her houseguest Vania (from Bulgaria) and I were.

We ran across the dumpster divers. Here in Phnom Penh we place our garbage out on the curb each evening in the small plastic bags we get from the grocers. In the morning "magically" the bags are gone. As you might guess, magic has nothing to do with it. Hard working folks from the provinces come by dragging their carts and load the garbage into them. Those carts are then dragged several kilometers outside of the city to the Stung Meanchey Municipal Waste Dump.

During the daylight hours entire families root through the dump for anything recyclable, re-usable or resale-able. For literally pennies a day preschool children and their older brothers and sisters risk disease climbing barefoot through everyone else's desechos to pick out whatever might earn their family enough to feed itself-barely.

For further info check out this New York Times article:

www.nytimes.com/2003/08/25/world/phnom-penh-journal-children- scavenge-a-life-of-sorts-in-the-garbage.html - 47k