Women's Rights: Srey Nak, It Would Just Take Almost Nothing…

While social workers distribute clothes in the alleys of the Boeng Trabek slum, Srey Nak steps forward with her frail figure, her boy in her arms, glances at the shorts, pants, and t-shirts whose numbers are dwindling before her eyes, watches for a few seconds the pile being stormed by the other moms with more basic manners, then walks away.

Srey Nak and her son

“…I don’t find anything for my son, it’ll be next time…”, she says with a very big smile as she sets her young son on her knees, who must weigh barely a few kilos less than her.

Born in the slum

Srey Nak was born in the Boeng Trabek slum in Phnom Penh twenty-two years ago. She’s never known anything else. Where other young women have unfortunately fallen into the trap of prostitution, Srey Nak has fought to avoid sinking into that life. To explain her journey, the young woman cites her desire to properly care for her son, to live better, and perhaps to escape this slum that grows narrower, more humid, and more overrun by household garbage every day.

I will leave the slum

“Between my parents and brothers and sisters, we’re nine in total in the family. My parents arrived back when Boeng Trabek wasn’t as populated or as dirty. Then more and more families came to escape life in the provinces and find something better in Phnom Penh. Some made it out, very few I think, and others held on here. I was born here, I’ve never known anything else, but I don’t intend to stay. I don’t have a precise plan yet, it’s hard, but I don’t think it’s impossible,” she recounts with surprising good humor, but also a minimum of realism: “I went to school very little, I don’t have any particular qualifications, and we’re only three in the family with regular jobs that support and feed everyone.”

Not tomorrow

“So it’s not tomorrow that I’ll leave the slum. I could have followed some girls who work in massage parlors and make a bit more money faster, but I refused. First, I got married and got pregnant very young, so I needed to find a job quickly with flexible hours to take care of my son. Our family is poor, but I received a fairly traditional upbringing and that’s important to me…”, she explains.

Properly caring for her son

Today, Srey Nak works in a hair salon, her husband is a day laborer on Phnom Penh’s construction sites. She earns barely a hundred dollars a month, her husband makes a bit more: between 150 and 200 dollars monthly. It’s not enough for the young couple with a child to support, but: “I manage to feed and dress my son properly and send him to school, and that’s not so bad. There’s also help from a few NGOs that eases the school and medical costs and lets us buy a few extra kilos of rice…”, she says.

Not so simple

As for her real ambitions, Srey Nak argues with surprising maturity: “I’ve already told you, like everyone here, at least the young ones, we want better, but it’s not so simple with my small salary and a child to raise. But I know it’s possible, I have a job that might evolve, my husband might get some better-paid contracts, my brothers and sisters might find work, it would just take a little, almost nothing, for my life to get better,” she concludes before heading to the hair salon, a few hundred meters from Boeng Trabek, where she styles young girls, some of whose paths she has refused to share.

Text and photographs by Christophe Gargiulo. With the help of Phrak Pirum.