Domestic Slaves

And one last piece of Cambodian news today. A recent article about child laborers in Cambodia bemoaned the situation. As well they should. So many of these kids spend their entire (and usually short) lives scrounging the streets for scrap recyclables they can on-sell to middlemen, or scrubbing floors for wealthy city relatives. I remember our next door neighbors had a young girl, perhaps sixteen years old. She never left their compound. When her masters (there’s no other decent word for it, certainly employers would be a form of whitewashing) were eating, she had a few minutes to herself. She’d usually sit at the closed doors, peeking out through the small hole in the door used to stick one’s hand through and open the lock. That was her involvement with the world outside. She was treated, as our friend said, like a cow.

Full piece here.