Every Thanksgiving, I think of Ya, in her flip-flops, sweeping up rotten fruit and dirty needles on the streets of Phnom Penh. I met her in 1998. It happened to be Thanksgiving. I had forgotten. I spent that holiday with Ya and her coworkers and hundreds of garbage pickers at the city’s Stung Meanchey dump, where the homeless and the jobless stab their way through the stench and mess, searching for anything to keep or sell. The following Thanksgiving, back in the States, I wrote a commentary about Ya for the San Jose Mercury News. I’ve never found her again, but I have returned to Stung Meanchey. It’s worse now. On my last visit to Cambodia, I saw that a little commune of huts on stilts had sprouted over the sludge. I learned that parents from faraway provinces were sending their kids to work in the dump, since an aid group had started a clinic and school there. Free health care, free education—better options than they have at home. Another woman has opened a little food shop, right in the dump. She sells fruits and snacks, but many of the child workers can’t even afford to buy lunch.
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