Home Sweet Home

Treng Treyung commune, Kompong Speu province.

“We’re here”
“Where?”
“Here”
“Where’s here?”
“Treng Treyung”
“Really? Oh.”

It would be very easy to drive right through the small cluster of houses flanked by a scruffy, smelly food market without even realising that you’d been there. There is no village centre, just the National Highway 4 (NH4) which is the Cambodian equivalent of the UK’s M1. It ships tonnes of goods every day from the port of Sihanoukville to Phnom Penh and even at 3am causes the houses on either side of it to rattle. This is where I’ll be living for the next year, just yards away from the Cambodian M1 and opposite the wooden shack which serves as the office for Mlup Baitong, one of the larger environmental NGOs in Cambodia.

I never had high hopes for a rocking nightlife in the village I’d be moving to but I did hope for a little more than this. Maybe a bakery and a pharmacy. Even an internet café. But no. There’s nothing. When I told the YfD team that I could cope with being on my own so long as I could get to civilisation, I never thought they’d really take me at my word on that one. I hardly even need to explore to know that there’s nothing here and for the first time since I’ve been in Cambodia, my heart is sinking to the pit of my stomach. It takes all my energy to smile faintly and mutter “Great. That’s not too far from Phnom Penh really is it?”

Having said all this, the villages where I’ll be working are nestled in idyllic mountains and seem to have some of the strongest community programmes I’ve seen. The Mlup Baitong staff are obviously well known and respected for supporting the attempts of villagers to bring themselves out of the poverty they’ve been left in since the Khmer Rouge. The villages in Kampong Speu are mainly remnants of the forced labour settlements which were created in 1975 by the Khmer Rouge when the citizens of Phnom Penh were marched out of their homes at only a few hours notice. Those living in the north of Phnom Penh were sent along the quickest route out of the city towards Battambong, those in the east towards Mondulkiri, those in the south to Takeo and those in west of Phnom Penh were sent along NH4 to Kampong Speu, my province. I’ve been told that many of the farmers were, just 30 years ago, part of the urban elite of Phnom Penh but all their wealth was lost in the 4 year dictatorship and when they returned to their homes in PP after the Vietnamese seized control of Cambodia removing Pol Pot from power, other people had already moved into the former homes in PP. As all the legal documents which would prove ownership had been burnt by the Khmer Rouge, the only choice many people had was to find a small plot of land in the countryside and try to scrape enough food out of the ground to feed their family. The regression in Khmer society from a burgeoning Asian country to an agrarian wasteland is unbelievably difficult for me to comprehend. I doubt that even a year living in Treng Treyung is going to be enough for me to even half-comprehend even one village’s situation but it’s going to be an interesting journey all the same.