Poverty
Sang Ly dreams, “I am still too young to recognize that we are poor-that in spite of the grandeur of the province and the hours my family toils each day, we don’t own the land on which we work. I haven’t yet grasped that earning enough money to buy food on the very day we eat isn’t an adventure embraced by the world.” Sang Ly’s family’s life-threatening poverty is obvious. They are laborers whose persistence is reliant on laboring on other people’s land. The paucity is somehow cyclical since it lasts from Sang Ly’s childhood to adulthood. Owing to deficiency, the principal objective for each day’s labor is to endure. They devote earnings in acquiring food for they do not possess land where they can cultivate theirs.
Persistence
Sang Ly elucidates, “The drivers of the monster bulldozers that push the trash into the piles at night will sometimes work around the shelters, leaving them intact for several days. Other rimes, a beautiful shelter, painstakingly crafted during the better part of the morning, may be nothing but a mix of flattened hope and mouldering trash a day later. It’s a lesson that is learned early at Stung Meanchey- and yet, it’s a lesson not of discouragement but rather of persistence.” Although the likelihood of permanence is minimal at Stung Meanchey, the inhabitants are not discouraged from endeavoring for their endurance. After the destruction of the shelters, the inhabitants set up new ones which is an indicator of resilience. The struggle at the dump heartens residents to endure notwithstanding the obliteration which the bulldozers epitomize.
