Riverkids Project

Listening to the lesson. The kids have just had two sets of donated clothes distributed, amid much playing and swapping of t-shirts and dresses.

Teacher's pet! The teacher is from the nearby state school where the kids will start attending in September. This little one is reading out to the other students, and did so in a thin clear voice with much gravitas!

Pictures everywhere - all stapled to the wall as everything else fell down. This is a typical shot of the grade school class in progress The kids move about a lot but are generally well-behaved.

The non-renovated bathroom at Steven's House. By local standards it's a bit dodgy but acceptable. We arranged for a local contractor to tile and repaint it, to make it cleaner and nicer for the kids' daily showers.

Glug, glug, glug - little plastic cups for each kid. Water filter! It's essentially a big terracotta pot inside a plastic vat and cost about US$10 at the local market. The water filter is a lot cheaper than buying clean water.

At the coffeeshop in the middle of the slum. Sophon and Dale are talking to a group of teenage girls and some of their parents about the Get Ready vocational training program. Most of the girls ended up signing up

None of them were quite tall enough to touch the floor with their feet, and they had skinny scratched up legs. They were all quiet, murmuring to each other shyly.

This is where their work ends up. One of the recycling sorting workshops in the slums. The kids wheel these handcarts around Phnom Penh, looking for rubbish that can be recycled. It's brought back and sorted, and if they're lucky, they earn US$1-2 for a long day's work.

Entrance to the working class neighbourhood across from the slum. Notice how the road is fairly clean, the intact tarpaulins and the little shop front. The slum across the road is materially just a little less - but socially, so very very different.