Phnom Penh - Photo Documentary : Living with the dead in Chhar Ampil

It's a small shanty town at the entrance of Phnom Penh city, a place that the locals call Chaar Ampil. Nothing is very original nor very new, except that the huts and shacks are built among the graves of a Vietnamese cemetery. A dozen families live there, victims of exclusion, poverty, or bad luck after they try to travel from their province to find a better life in the capital city of Cambodia. Photographs by Christophe Gargiulo.

Life among graves

With its population growing fast, Phnom Penh  struggles to propose housing for residents with very low incomes, thus they are several thousands who have taken up residence around cemeteries, creating small communities, villages in the city in which prostitution, abuse, drugs and diseases become common.

Kids play on graves while adults get busy

Inside this community, the presence of the dead does not seem to affect children who smile quite easliy. In Chhar Ampil, children play around graves, climb over them while some adults use the tiles around the graves to wash clothes or to dry rice and meat.

Kids from the community

The way these people can handle the presence of graves or even show some indifference could perhaps be explained by a very different conception of death by Cambodians. With prevalence of Buddhism, cremations are by far the most common fate for dead people in the kingdom. Christian burial tomb and are therefore an entirely different or even unknown concept for them. 

Some children from the community go to school, others don't

Some residents have even used the tombs as an extension of their home, setting up a garden or some seats to make it a relaxing place.As to evoke ghosts, a young resident with tattooed forearms, sitting on his motorcycle and smoking cheap cigarettes laughs and says: '' ... It's true we think about it a little at first, but after, we deal with it. If the spirits of the dead buried there are among us, we disturb them, they don't disturb us...''.

Smiling kid sitting on a grave

Only a few have the chance to go to the neighborhood school, some families earn enough money to feed them and to provide food and clothes, but they don't make enough money to rent a proper shelter. If some have jobs, the most common activity is waste collection, work on construction sites, but also prostitution that help some families to survive. However, many girls and mothers are HIV-positive and get some support with regular visits from a social worker, Maïra, from Brazil, who decided to contribute to try to improve the daily life of a family whose mother is HIV positive.

HIV positive mother with her kid

French version of this article on Cambodge Mag here

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