To Catch a Falling Spoon
It's not a typical workplace. But then, the workers are not typical either. The piles of garbage at Phnom Penh’s Stung Meanchey dump in Cambodia tell a story about the lives and living strategies of about 200 children who picked through garbage there in the mid-1990s.Those young scavengers reflect the growing phenomenon worldwide of child labor, which has been linked with poverty and economic development. In Cambodia’s case, historical and political factors also must be considered.
The complexities of Cambodia’s past and present provide a unique framework for looking at the lives of these kids and the hazardous occupation of scavenging. If developing countries are to improve the lives of children and minimize the incidence of child labor, policymakers and researchers must examine their world in the most comprehensive manner possible and identify distinct qualities in each country.
In 1996-97, while a graduate student at Ohio University, I researched and wrote my master's thesis on the living strategies of children who earned money as garbage scavengers in the Phnom Penh municipal garbage dump. I got the idea for the title, "To Catch a Falling Spoon," from one of the kids. I asked him why the children ran after the garbage trucks before they even had entered the dump. He explained that the most valuable trash was quickly snatched up by the fastest ones. So he and others ran after the trucks to catch treasures such as falling spoons, forks and knives. The link below leads to a pdf version of the thesis.
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