A Cameroonian woman died in Phnom Penh about a month after escaping a scam compound and trying to return home, spreading worry among other workers from Africa who say they just want to leave their experience in forced jobs in Cambodia behind them.
Mekong Independent viewed photos and videos of the body of a woman being carried in a bundle of blankets out of a guesthouse. Staff from a Phnom Penh pagoda confirmed that they had taken in the body of a Cameroonian woman on February 19 to be held for family or peers to claim, but they could not share more details.
Alan, a Ugandan man using a pseudonym who stayed at the same guesthouse as the Cameroonian woman, said she had struggled to eat well and stay healthy since she started working in Cambodia. They escaped a scam company and came to Phnom Penh, and were constantly moving between guesthouses, sleeping in packed rooms, and skipping meals. She got much weaker as a result, Alan said.
“When she got sick they used to give her aspirin,” the only treatment that other escaped workers could afford, he said. “They never got to know what she was suffering from.”
Former scam workers who say they were trafficked from Uganda to Cambodia spoke to Mekong Independent, but asked not to use their real names out of concern of jeopardizing their chances to return home.
He had heard that other Cameroonians stuck in Cambodia wanted to pool money to send the body to their country, but everyone was already straining for income.
“For a live person going home is expensive, what about going home as a dead person?” he asked.
Alan claimed that the woman who died was among a group who tried to approach the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration office in Phnom Penh for assistance, but this detail could not be verified. IOM did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
A local official in Pur Senchey district said there had been multiple deaths of foreigners early this year, mostly of Chinese and Pakistani nationals, but he had not heard of the case of the Cameroonian woman. The official said he was not allowed to speak on the record.
Chhun Chansokha, director of the Interior Ministry’s police technology and science department, said he had also not heard of the Cameroonian woman’s death, but explained that most cases were handled at the local level. He said he did not have figures for how many foreigners or which nationalities had died, but it was not much different in recent years. Phnom Penh police spokesperson Sam Vichhika could not be reached. A Facebook user posted about a Cameroonian woman’s death in Cambodia on February 19.
A morgue staff member at a second pagoda, who declined to be named, said the pagoda’s freezers held multiple foreigners who had died recently and had not yet been claimed. The staff member would not say how many.
Kampuchea Thmey reported a Chinese woman died on Monday night after falling from the Diamond Sky Entertainment Club, a building that was raided in a drugs case last year.
John, another Ugandan man using a pseudonym, didn’t personally know the Cameroonian woman who died, but he had learned about the case from a Cameroonian man who he met in a compound in Cambodia’s Bavet city. He recognized the man he worked with as one of the other Cameroonians carrying her body out of the room.
Seeing the video of her body felt foreboding, he said.
“The situation is hectic, we live in worries every day, regardless of not having food or shelter but looking at people dying is unbearable,” he said in reaction. “At any time and at any point you can get sick and without medication … the [outcome] is to die, that’s the day in the life we’re living, worrying from morning to evening.”
The Ugandan workers who spoke to Mekong Independent say they are not sure when they will be able to go home, and the uncertainty makes it harder to buy tickets. They’ve been added to lists to try to enter the single known shelter accepting foreign workers who were trafficked, but they were told the shelter, run by NGO Caritas Cambodia, has no space. They’ve also been added to a list prepared for their embassy in Malaysia, in order to waive overstay fees. However, they said they had been told Ugandans can only leave in small groups of roughly 20 people at a time, and thus they need to buy tickets at the last-minute.
Those who haven’t been able to find shelter say they are quickly losing money that they hoped to save for their return tickets.
James, a third Ugandan using a pseudonym, tried to go to Caritas’s shelter, as he cannot afford to pay for both an air ticket and an extended stay in Cambodia. When he tried to stay in a rented room in Phnom Penh, he and a group of five other Ugandans were rejected; the landlord said he wouldn’t rent to foreigners.
James said he’s prepared to ask his family to help pay for the ticket, but they can only provide small amounts of support.
“There are some rooms that sleep five people for $10. You try to combine but still it’s nothing, you can’t spend when you’re not working,” he said, adding he had already spent the little salary he earned from his forced labor in Kampot and Tbong Khmum provinces. “Where could the money come from? At home, people are poor, they don’t have money.”
As a result, James said, he was eating one meal per day of plain white rice for 1,000 riels ($0.25), or sometimes fast for the day.
In reaction to the death of the Cameroonian woman, James said he regrets his decision to pursue a job offer in Vietnam — where he originally believed his job would be, before he was smuggled to Kampot province.
“It is first and foremost painful” to hear about the death, James said. “Someone came here to try to change their life. Coming here, they’re alive. But going home, they’ve died. That is something painful.”