The Common Language Project seeks news from around the world about groups and movements working outside of the mainstream, with a specific focus on those in stigmatized regions as well as countries underrepresented in American media coverage. Jessica Partnow, Sarah Stuteville and Alex Stonehill are currently travelling in South Asia, the Middle East and Central Asia recording the stories of individuals and groups who epitomize this purpose.

Our goal is to facilitate communication amongst the global citizenry to spread evidence that “marginalized” individuals and communities can and do exercise their own inherent power to realize a better vision of their lives, apart from that handed down by governments and the mass media.

 

 

 

 On this page:

 

Cambodian Slum Women
Fight for their Rights 

 By Jessica Partnow

 

 

 

.....more CLP articles:    

 

  More Than Mouths to Feed

  Saving the Sal Trees

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Phnom Penh, Cambodia: March 14, 2006

 

At first glance, Tumlop 2 village looks like any third world city slum: crowded huts with corrugated tin roofs are scattered along dusty dirt paths, and barefoot children mingle with freely wandering chickens and dogs.  Look closer and you’ll find that this community also houses a tidy health center where local women diagnose and treat common ailments.  Look even closer and you’ll see that gender relations in this poor and traditional society may be more evolved than in the more wealthy households of the teeming and ever-expanding city that surrounds them.

 

Women outside Somreth Ream's house in Chemreun
Inside the health center, a humble but cleanly scrubbed building rising on thin stilts above the scummy green water that surrounds it, large plastic jars of medicinal herbs stand near a modest medicine cabinet, though many prescribed herbal remedies will be made on the spot, using fresh plants growing nearby.  Posters promoting literacy and gender equality cover the simple plank walls – this small center is also home to trainings on domestic violence and women’s rights.

 

Urban Poor Women Development (UPWD), a nonprofit organization located in Phnom Penh, helped the Tumlop 2 community develop its health center in 1998, and the organization’s six paid staff and five volunteers are currently helping 11 slum communities in the area, with plans to add three more this year.

 

The organization first developed its health program when the international anti-poverty group Actionaid sent a volunteer medical expert from its India program to train UPWD staff in community health care.

 

Ouk Phally, whose husband died from AIDS, in Chemreun. She too is infected with HIV. Her shaved head indicates that she is a widow.
Armed with informative laminated drawings describing illnesses, treatments, and basic female anatomy, UPWD is equipped to train women selected from within slum communities to act as ‘Community Leader,’ administering medical treatment and counseling to all community members.  The most serious cases are directed to the hospital, but many can be treated onsite, for free.

 

Soptialla, the community leader in Tumlop 2, smiled when asked whether she received a salary for her work at the health center.  “If we have to do a procedure, or take someone’s temperature, we might ask for a donation of 100 or 200 riel (2.5 to 5 cents US).  But if they can’t pay, we will still help them,” she said, speaking through a translator, “I was inspired to do this work because I saw big problems with women’s health.  Poor people can’t access government health services because of the expense.  Through the center, I can advise women here on how to treat their problems with herbal medicine.”

 

Simoun at the Tumlop 2 health center. He says UPWD's gender trainings changed his outlook on his relationship with his wife and family.
Soptialla also helps identify married couples to participate in intensive domestic violence and women’s rights trainings.  Simoun, a man who formerly abused his wife, spoke of his experience at UPWD’s training: “Before I never shared the housework with my wife.  I only worked outside the house.  I learned more at the gender training: if I didn’t have a wife, I would have to pay someone to do all of that work.  Now that we share the chores, my family is more peaceful, and all the housework goes much faster.”

 

All of UPWD’s work focuses on developing leadership among poor women.  “We founded this organization because we saw that women in urban areas had no education, no access to government services, nothing,” explained UPWD director Soam Samon.

 

The neighborhoods that UPWD works with are all slums, but great disparity exists even among these poor communities.  While in Tumlop 2 a visit to the health center at the heart of the village makes it clear that residents’ lives are improving despite extreme poverty (most families live on $1-2 a day), Chamreun, a slum named by its residents after one of UPWD’s staff, is sadly distant from even that humble success.

 

In Chamreun, random piles of playing cards, faded yellow plastic bags, and rotting coconut shells float on fetid, evaporating puddles and fill the pitted dirt roads lined by open sewers.  Ubiquitous flies swirl around babies and toddlers clad only in t-shirts, who squat making toys out of empty water bottles.  Most of these children can expect to become garbage pickers by age ten.

 

But Community Leader Rous Seun is already seeing improvements, even in the few months that UPWD has been here.  “Before it was like the people weren’t much of a community.  Now that we’re doing these things, these programs, we talk to each other, the people come talk to me, and we work together.”

 

Despite these positive programs, land rights are the largest challenge UPWD and these communities face.  The government can impose forced relocations of entire populations at any time – their preference for the term “temporary community” is no coincidence.  Much of the land inhabited by slum dwellers is officially owned by the government, but corrupt officials can sell the land to private interests with little recourse, forcing communities to start over from scratch.

 

Somreth Ream with portrait of her husband, who she says stopped abusing her after a UPWD training. She has lost 7 of 14 children over the course of her life.
UPWD’s strategy to combat this problem is to build infrastructure within these slums, with the hope that community members will be able to demand that their new location be equally well developed.  A temporary solution at best, UPWD also sees the need to enforce legal rights in assigning deeds to poor people, who legally become landowners after squatting a piece of land for five years.

 

UPWD also works to ensure that communities are invested in their own development.  With this in mind, infrastructure projects are only partially funded by UPWD, with 30-50% of funding and 100% of physical labor supplied by the communities themselves.  The organization hopes that this model will empower slum dwellers and community leaders to manage their own development process, even after UPWD’s direct work is finished.

 

With the right combination of community and government support, and enough funding, UPWD believes that slums like Chamreun can approach Tumlop 2’s level of development and infrastructure within 8 years.  But with 569 slum regions in Phnom Penh alone, and a mere $60,000 annual budget, UPWD won’t be able to solve the problems of slum dwellers in Phnom Penh alone.

 

Whatever UPWD’s future, or the future of slum dwellers rights issues in Cambodia, the organization believes that their programming will have a long-term impact.  As program coordinator Kou Sina explained: “UPWD won’t last forever…but these communities can.”

 

 

Photos by Alex Stonehill.

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