The Horror of Poverty

Nar's funeral - or what I will refer to as one - took place 25 hours after he died. His family, too poor to afford any luxuries, took money given by neighbours and extended family members, as is the custom, and bought some cheap planks of wood which they hammered together to make a coffin.

I saw them making the coffin under the house a few hours after he died. The men were busying themselves with the task, while the women sat not far away, chatting together. Children played nearby, and an ignorant bypasser would hardly know that anything unusual had happened that day. Of course the mandatory loud speaker had been erected, and the hired priest was singing into it, stopping occasionally as people came to view the body.

Nar's body lay on a mat, covered by the same dirty blanket they had used at the hospital. He was surrounded by small little candles and burning incense. They had taken off the splint that had supported his arm, and his father respectfully removed the blanket for me to see his body.


No one cried. No one wailed. There was not a wet eye in the room during the twenty minutes or so that I sat with them. So I experienced grief the way a poor Cambodian family lives it and was most impacted by the fact that their grieving, like Nar's pain, omitted no sound.

So the following morning, I was not suprised to find that activity and not tears surrounded me again as I sat under the house, waiting for them to bring the body out and walk the short distance to the place where they would burn it.


Nar's family were too poor to afford the US$25 to have him cremated at the temple. They owned no land to bury him, and unlike even poor land owners, they had no option but to burn Nar's body a few metres in from the side of the main road, in a clearning they had made in a rubber plantation.

His coffin, now decorated with gold wrapping paper, in what I can only imagine was an attempt to make something grand- looking of their humble circumstances, made its way from his home to its pyre in less than five minutes. There, it was placed on a prepared mound of cut kindling, then surrounded by larger logs, dousted with a mixture of kerosene and household cooking oil and set alight.


A million thoughts passed through my mind as I watched the black smoke curl into the sky. It seemed most insulting and yet appropriate that this child, who died almost anonymously, would be cremated in almost the same way, in a rubber plantation, on the side of a main road.

The horrors of poverty. The price of fear and ignorance.


There is also now a million things I could say about hope and hopelessness in my own country and countries like mine where copious amounts of wealth can even allow us to pre-prepare our funerals so the dead are still somehow in control even though they are no longer living... but I don't think I'll say anything just now.

I just want you to remember Nar.