In the space between houses, some families raise carp and catfish in bamboo cages or keep floating gardens of potted pepper and papaya trees. He was sometimes on the lake for a month at a stretch, selling pots and stoves, sleeping rough under the long-tail’s planked roof.īut he always came back to Chong Koh, his home of several years, where the villagers live on cabin-size houseboats and junks arranged in tidy rows orthogonal to either shore. And Kbal Taol, where fishermen lived in clustered homes on the open water, risking the daily storms, competing to catch hatchlings with nets up to half a mile long. There was Prek Tor, a remote village where every family, rich or poor, had a wooden cage for raising crocodiles. “I know Tonle Sap like my hand,” he said. His wooden long-tail, moored against the house, covered in tarpaulin and heavy with cargo, carried him to floating villages as far as 90 miles away. Someone had thrown the stove away, but he thought he could fix it to sell on his next trip onto the lake. The afternoon of my arrival, Hoarith was squatting over an old butane camp stove, scraping at a rusted gas valve. Every few months, he got his ancient air compressor working and swam beneath the house, a rubber hose between his teeth, to refill the cement jars that kept the whole thing buoyant. Sometimes the house had to be towed closer to the receding shoreline so that storms or the waves of passing ships would not capsize it. When I first visited, in late July, there was always something for Hoarith to do: repairing storm damage in a wall of thatched palm, clearing the water hyacinths that collected along the upstream porch. Dangers on a floating village multiply in the rainy season. ![]() When she left for the day, around 6, Hoarith rolled up their floor mat and got to work.Ĭhong Koh is one of hundreds of floating villages, comprising tens of thousands of families, on the Tonle Sap River and the lake of the same name in Cambodia. and bought a bowl of noodle soup from a passing sampan, the same genre of wandering bodega from which his wife, Vo Thi Vioh, sold vegetables houseboat to houseboat. The best handyman living among the boat people in Chong Koh was named Taing Hoarith. This article was written with the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
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