n Chhloung district, in rural Cambodia, a lack of access to clean water and proper sanitation facilities mean children and their families are highly susceptible to disease. This is because people are forced to use unsafe water from damaged wells or fetch dirty water from local creeks. They must also go to the toilet in the forest, use leaves instead of toilet paper and wash their hands with water from rice fields rather than with soap.
“I need to carry 20 litres of water with a barrel and walk around 1km from the creek to my home twice a day,” says 12-year-old Yin Meas (pictured above), who lives in a remote, mountainous area of Chhloung, located about 27km from the closet main road. “Sometimes I fall down and injure my arm and leg and break the barrel. I used to get typhoid and had to go to the health centre several times last year,” he adds.
What health problems are caused by unclean water?
For young children, diseases like typhoid, hepatitis and diarrhoea can be fatal. Rath Eav, the commune vice-chief of Yin Meas village says: “Most people, especially children, in this village get diseases related to stomach and intestine problems.” She explains that this is mainly caused by a lack of access to clean water and proper sanitation facilities.
“The majority of people, around 90 per cent, in this village do not have a toilet or a well. Some share with those who do have a well and some go to the nearby creek and carry water home. The wells in our village are very old and consist of rust that contaminates the water,” Rath Eav says.
Papua New Guinea is a surprising place. It is a land of untamed, rugged beauty with warm and friendly people. It can also be a violent and confronting place to live and work.
I am constantly reminded of the incredibly dichotomy of life here: the generosity of spirit contrasted with incredible acts of hate, extreme poverty and affluence existing side by side, a passive acceptance of life coupled with destructive violence.
I have been welcomed by colleagues and rural villagers, and been thanked by people on the street for making an effort to understand PNG and its diverse, complex cultures. I have run the streets as part of the Trukai Olympic Day Fun Run surrounded by 30,000 people. I am working among amazing, life-charged Papua New Guineans who are working to make a difference in their country, and succeeding.
Yet there also exists a darker side to PNG life. To truly understand this, you need to spend some time here, speaking to the locals and seeing the world through their eyes.
Life in Port Moresby is hard. It is an expensive place to live and often unsafe on the streets. People arrive here from other provinces hoping to find work and a better life, yet many find only hardship that traps them here and perpetuates the poverty cycle. Rent for even basic accommodation can run upwards of $250 per week to $2,000 per week in expat areas. Bearing in mind minimum wage is less than $1 per hour and even professionals often take home only $125 per week. Desperation often drives desperate acts, from pickpocketing to armed robbery and car-jacking.
Security dominates everything. It is tighter for expats, who generally live in razor-wire surrounded compounds, moving about in safe areas of the city and often with an escort. These advantages are not available to average Papua New Guineans, who have to navigate the crowded streets, markets and public buses in a heightened state of alert.
I get regular security advice from many of my PNG colleagues, who advise on where it is safe for me to visit, how I should dress in certain situations and how to act in a culturally appropriate manner. And I find it exhausting. Constantly being alert to changes in the behaviour of people on the street, monitoring and scanning to detect potential threats and being mentally prepared for what I will do in a multitude of different scenarios. Will I run? Can I fight back? What if there is a weapon involved?
But security precautions cannot shield me from what I have witnessed on the street. A woman’s bruised face, a female settler living nearby being hit and not being able to help her, accounts of female Papua New Guinean friends being followed by a car when returning to the office from lunch. These same friends won’t travel on buses without a male escort and often aren’t willing to take their children shopping for fear of being harassed. Perhaps most heartbreaking of all was hearing the story of a four-year old girl who was sexually assaulted. These are but a few examples of what many women and children face daily.
