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.”
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.”
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.”
Channa’s earnings were the family’s only source of income until Pov dropped out of school and began shining shoes along Phnom Penh’s riverfront alongside his sister. Then, the day before Nick Danziger met the family, police chased the children and Channa dropped her precious scales, breaking the glass over the measuring dial. Thankfully, it still works.
The family lives in a tiny hut, with a ceiling too low for them to stand up straight, in a squatters’ neighbourhood. For dinner, they usually eat whatever they can find on the street.
Rihorn, Channa and Pov: 2010
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.
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, Channa and Pov: 2015
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.
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.
- 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