Category: Daily Life in Cambodia

Trash or treasure?

One aspect of life in Cambodia that I find particularly disturbing is the high percentage of people who make their living handling trash, either collecting it for recycling or for disposal.

It’s hard to know what he has collected but it looks like he has had a fairly successful morning–for which he’ll probably get a dollar or two at the recycling place.
This man has a load of metal cans and assorted plastic and metal rubbish.
A third recycler I ran into this morning was this woman flattening cardboard boxes to load them unto her cart.

Rain, rain, go away….

We’re still in the rainy season–last week it poured almost every day–but the rains are a little less frequent now. This afternoon we had a downpour and I got this picture of construction workers 20 stories up in a building two blocks away. The man on the left may be thinking that it’s lousy timing since it’s almost time for him to head home.

Work=Home

“Going to work” has a different connotation in Cambodia than it has in many other countries where there is a commute from your home to your place of employment. In Cambodia, the majority of businesses are contained within the building that is also the home. These two photos are examples of that on a big scale.

This a large warehouse-type structure selling generators, air pumps, water pumps, and other types of machines. But notice that the rear of the building encloses a three-story housing block. The family built their home inside the warehouse.
Here is the same arrangement, on a much smaller scale, with just a two-floor house built into the back corner.

What is it?

Here’s another Cambodian fruit for which I don’t know the name. They are rock-hard and about the size of a tennis ball or maybe even a baseball. They must be seasonal because I don’t see them very often–or maybe they’re just not that popular.