A journey across four continents: Danziger's tales from Cambodia

Channa, 12, supports her sick mother and younger brother by weighing people on a precious set of bathroom scales on the streets of Phnom Penh

Guardian Wed 30 Sept 2015

Channa goes to school in the morning and works to earn money in the afternoon. Photograph: Nick Danziger/NB Pictures

Like 17% of people in Cambodia, the family live in extreme poverty, subsisting on less than $1.25 a day. Rihorn’s daughter Channa, 12, supports her mother and brother Pov, nine. She goes to school in the morning and works to earn money in the afternoon and evening. She shines shoes and weighs people on her scales, charging 100 riel per client. Channa explains how she got the scales: “Shortly before my grandmother died, she was given $20 by a passer-by. She told my mother to buy something that was an investment to earn money.”

 

Rihorn, Channa and Pov, 2005

Rihorn, 42, lives in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh. She is divorced from an abusive husband. “I am not well and can no longer work to support my children,” she says. “Sometimes I am so sick that I cannot cook or clean and my children do not have food to eat. A few weeks after my second child was born, I became sick due to childbirth – we call it toas. I have a stiff backbone, I’m hot and feverish, and my uterus and fallopian tubes hurt. I don’t know how to cure it and so I have bought different kinds of medicine in the hope that I will find a cure.”

Channa, 12, sets out with her bathroom scales, watched by her brother Pov, nine, and mother Rihorn, in Phnom Penh, 2005. All photographs: Nick Danziger/NB Pictures

Rihorn: ‘Sometimes I am so sick that I cannot cook or clean and my children do not have food to eat.’

Rihorn explains that she has had three miscarriages due to carrying heavy loads while pregnant. “I used to have high fever during the pregnancies. I would call the traditional birth attendant to massage my uterus, and it costs 20,000 riel ($5) each time. It costs more if it involves the traditional attendants touching my blood. Each time I needed to pay the traditional attendant, I would borrow money. For 10,000 riel I pay back 16,000 riel. I now owe 100,000 riel for food and taking care of my sickness.”

Channa and her family – along with the other slum dwellers – were evicted from their home in 2006 and left to fend for themselves in the countryside.

In 2006, Channa and her family – along with hundreds of other slum dwellers – were evicted from their home. “They told us we were being taken to new homes,” says Channa. “They promised us the deeds to a ‘bungalow’. But we were driven 45 minutes into the countryside, where there was nothing.”

There, they tried to fend for themselves, making a shelter from plastic sheeting. Overnight, the land flooded. There were no jobs in this isolated place, and Channa struggled against the financial pressure to become a “waitress” – a euphemism for a sex worker in Cambodia.

Pov, aged 14 – he would have liked to attend school but the family are in too much debt.

Soon after the family were evicted, Pov got into a fight. He picked up a bamboo pole to protect his cousin and was arrested – and jailed. After six months his mother managed to free him from prison by paying a bribe of $100, which she borrowed from a moneylender at 30% monthly interest. Pov would have liked to return to school but the family were in debt and he needed to earn money. It would take them five years to pay off the loan.

Rihorn’s daughter Channa, 12, earns money by weighing people on her scales. Her brother Pov, nine, shines shoes.

Rihorn, Channa and Pov: 2015

Pov sells snails from his stall. On a good day he can sell 60kg of steamed and seasoned snails.

 Today Pov is a snail seller. At 3am every morning, he takes delivery of sacks of live snails. As the sun rises he and his cousins steam them with spices and lemongrass on a patch of dry ground, then load them on to a dozen motocarts. On a good day he sells 60kg of snails. He still lives with his mother, and gives her all his earnings.

Rihorn, 54, pictured with her granddaughter.

In 2015 Channa moved to Dorng Tong, her husband’s fishing hamlet about 70km upriver from Phnom Penh. She had a daughter, whom she left to be raised by Rihorn. Channa is now pregnant with her second child.

Channa, pregnant with her second child, in Dorng Tong, 70km from Phnom Penh.

Nick Danziger’s exhibition, Revisited, runs at

Columbia University in New York until 15 October, and at London’s Royal Geographic Society, 2-6 November