Last week I wrote about the redevelopment of the Siem Reap River banks here. Now, just about a week later, all the houses and businesses are gone and replaced by heaps of rubble dotted by bulldozers. Thanks to donors from around the world, Anjali House’s fundraising efforts have already been successful and the impacted families have been meeting with the Director of Anjali to help figure out a way forward for the families and their kids. It will be a long, complicated road, to be sure.
I knew that the government had set aside a large parcel of land to become a new village for the displaced families and I wanted to see what it was like. So my tuk tuk driver took me out there the other afternoon, over 7 kilometres away and some terrain so bumpy that his already dodgy shock absorbers completely gave out. We made it, though, and this is what we found. This posted maps shows the plan:
This shows hundreds of lots for houses, each about 10 metres square, columns of outhouses interspersed, a well for each ten families or so, room for a school, a health centre, a market. In some ways, this may well be quite an upgrade from what these families have had before. This is the plan for the future. This, though, is the present reality.
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| toilets |
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| houses being built |
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| houses being built along the road into the development |
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| A pond and the start of a shop |
A few houses have been completed but the building of the infrastructure has just begun.This new development is years away from completion. And in the meantime, the family’s have been evicted from the river, and in a month, the flooding monsoon season begins and most of this could well be under water.
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