Living with the dead: the cemetery shacks of Phnom Penh
Thousands of Cambodia's most destitute have taken up residence in the capital's cemeteries, turning them into makeshift villages that are breeding grounds for disease and abuse. David Eimer reports. Pictures by Scott Howes
Home for Kok Sray, her four children and three grandchildren is a one-room wooden shack in Phnom Penh. The family sleep on the floor, cook on an open fire and share an unhygienic outside toilet with their neighbours. For many residents of Cambodia's capital, a city whose population is growing 20 per cent annually as migrants from rural areas arrive in search of work, such rudimentary accommodation is typical. But Kok Sray's house is built over a solid concrete tomb that juts out just beneath her front door.
"The first night I slept here I was very frightened. I didn't want to go outside," recalls Kok Sray, a wizened, dark-skinned 75-year-old who came to Phnom Penh from Prey Veng province, in southern Cambodia. "It took one month before I stopped being scared of the grave and I could come out at night. Now, I am used to it."
Kok Sray has spent the past 18 years living with the dead. And she is not alone. Some 489 families reside alongside hers in Doeum Sleng, a village that has taken root in a cemetery for Phnom Penh's Vietnamese community, as well as some Chinese immigrants. Similar villages have sprung up in graveyards across Phnom Penh, to accommodate the people who have come to the capital looking for a better life.
Houses in Doeum Sleng range from tiny, wooden cubicles covered in plastic sheeting with room for just one person to homes that incorporate corrugated iron roofs and concrete walls. Some line the single, rutted dirt track that runs through the village, others perch over the graves on stilts, but all are surrounded by elaborate tombs etched with Vietnamese writing or Chinese characters recording the names of the dead. Many bear the yin yang symbol, a few have crosses, indicating a Christian grave.
"I don't believe in ghosts because I've never seen one in all the time I've lived here," says Srung Srey Pou, a 42-year-old woman who moved to Doeum Sleng in 1995. Many Khmer, or Cambodian, people believe in the existence of a spirit world. "Perhaps we disturb the ghosts, but they don't disturb me."
Some of the tombs have become extensions of the houses. Washing is done on them or they are used as makeshift kitchen surfaces, on which rice is dried and cooked. They serve as a playground for the village children, who clamber over them, and as a social space for the adults who play card games and drink rice wine on top of them.
