Photo Album: Tuol Sambo a Cambodian AIDS Colony

The Cambodian government has created a de facto AIDS colony by relocating a group of HIV/AIDS-affected families, evicted from their homes at Borei Keila in central Phnom Penh, to live in sub-standard housing at Tuol Sambo village on the city outskirts.

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The HIV/AIDS-affected families were sent to live in green metal sheds at Tuol Sambo (at left, above) which are starkly different from other houses in the area and elsewhere in Cambodia. Before the evicted families even arrived, local people were calling the green sheds “the AIDS village”.	At left, the crude metal sheds provided by the government to the HIV/AIDS families to live in. At right, just a few feet away, is considerably better-quality brick housing which is being built, with the assistance of an NGO, for other homeless families who are not known to be HIV/AIDS-affected.
Twenty HIV/AIDS-affected families were evicted from Borei Keila and sent to the Tuol Sambo on June 18, 2009. At Borei Keila, they had first been evicted from their homes in 2007 and then spent two years living in squalid temporary accommodation – in metal sheds (at right, above) – while the government promised to find a permanent solution for them. On June 18, they were evicted from the metal sheds to make way for a garden to be planted in front of a new Ministry of Tourism building (at left).	The government’s “solution” was to take the HIV/AIDS families to Tuol Sambo where, instead of proper housing, it had constructed similar cramped, rudimentary metal sheds for them to live in – this time permanently.
Families were dumped with their meager possessions at semi-rural Tuol Sambo, 20km from the central city, and far from their jobs, hospitals and schools.	Each family, regardless of size, was given only one room, measuring 3.5m x 4.8 m. The room above is for a family of seven, including five children.
The rooms do not meet international minimum standards for even emergency temporary housing with respect to size, fire safety and sanitation. The rooms are also extremely hot and poorly ventilated, due to the metal walls and roof and the lack of space between buildings.	Sanitation is sub-standard and toilet pipes flow out to open sewers such as this.
The construction work is shoddy, with rust and crumbling cement visible in places.	There is virtually no privacy, due to the thin metal walls between rooms which do not even reach the roof. Above (in a photo taken two months ago during construction) are the side-by-side squat toilets of adjoining rooms, now separated by a metal wall.
The rooms do not have kitchens or running water. A single well (at right) provides water for the 20 families, and for others who may be resettled here in the future. (It is feared that the government may move up to 40 more HIV/AIDS-affected families to live at Tuol Sambo.)

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