Person of the Week: Scott Neeson
Children find refuge from the stench and squalor of life in Phnom Penh's dump.
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia<p>Nov. 28, 2008— -- The garbage dump in Cambodia's capital spans eight football fields and is more than 100 feet deep. Its stench in the hot humidity of Phnom Penh carries for miles.
Steung Meanchey, the massive dump, offers up scraps of glass and metal that children gather and sell, making less than a dollar a day -- enough for one bowl of rice. Many live in shacks made of bits of wood and plastic. It is where the poorest of Cambodia's desperately poor children eke out a living.
With nowhere else to go, children head to the dump as a last resort. Many have lost their parents and this dumpsite is their lifeline.
Hope Amid the Rubble
While on vacation between jobs in 2003, former top Hollywood executive Scott Neeson saw the dump's devastation for the first time.
"It shattered my world. It was like walking from the best parts of west Los Angeles, where I was living, to the apocalypse," Neeson said. "It's worse than anything you can imagine. There are body parts, there are chemicals. I found limbs. I found fetuses, chemical waste. There are rats, all sorts of sinkholes that people disappear into."
Peak hours between midnight and 4 a.m. are the most crowded and dangerous times at the dump.
"There's an average of 24 children every year who are backed over by the trucks and tractors," Neeson said. "You see the sight of 20 to 30 kids with flashlights on their heads and motorbike batteries on their backs going through the garbage. It's just the saddest, saddest thing."
After seeing the desperate circumstances of the dump with his own eyes, Neeson vowed to give these poor children a second chance in life to escape their impoverished surroundings.
"This country is so broken," said Joseph Mussomeli, former U.S. Ambassador to Cambodia. "It has been 30 to 40 years of a nightmare -- genocide, civil war, foreign invasions, rampant corruption; anyone who has had any education has been annihilated."
In 2004, Neeson left the film industry and moved from Tinseltown to Phnom Penh to found the Cambodian Children's Fund, or CCF.
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