After two suspicious fires in three days destroyed a large squatter area along Phnom Penh's waterfront, more than 20,000 people were left homeless. The government moved these desperately poor people out to a new site far from Phnom Penh and without even the most basic infrastructure. Here are pictures from the resettlement area, with photos of one family Maryknoll is helping in order to keep their children in school.
Families with no other resources were forced to accept the government's tract of land given them about 15 kms outside the city, in what a few months ago was a rice paddy.	A few roads were scraped in the flat paddy land to form the nucleus of what will actually be a small city.
Jim Noonan, a Maryknoll priest, has a small program that provides support to impoverished families to enable them to keep their children in school. Here he receives a traditional Khmer greeting from a little girl he helps.	Families with no savings lost all their worldly possessions--not much to begin with--in the fires. NGOs provided them with palm leaf walls and bamboo slats to erect emergency shelters in the new settlement area.
These three children are some of the lucky ones. They may not have any worldly goods but at least they can continue in school, poor as the schools are. Some day they'll be able to afford a reed mat to cover the bamboo slats to keep out the mosquitoes when they are sleeping.	Jerry Nagle (left) is Maryknoll's director of planned giving. He is currently raising money to help the school program in Cambodia and came to see so he could better explain the needs to donors. Jim Noonan has been in Cambodia now for more than ten years and works primarily with very poor AIDS patients.

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