A woman rinses her hair and conducts her morning ablutions using a bucket of water amongst ...

A woman rinses her hair and conducts her morning ablutions using a bucket of water amongst bricks, timber and scattered rubbish on a vacant block of land in central Phnom Penh. She is being observed by a group of labourers (left) who have paused for a morning cigarette break from the building they are constructing on a vacant block of land while a fellow worker (far left) continues laying bricks. A towel lies at the woman's feet and to her right is a dilapidated French colonial building (depicted in P03258.434) which has been occupied by squatters. She, like many thousands of others, has become one of Cambodia's landless poor who have been forced to squat in poverty on whatever land or buildings they find available, having returned under the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC)'s Repatriation Component after years of exile in the Thai border camps to discover their former homes were already 'owned' and occupied. Many other families have been displaced by fighting, landmines and rural poverty and are drawn to the city where the prospect of jobs appears brighter, swelling the city's population from 615,000 in 1990 to 1.3 million by 1993 and further compounding an already spiralling housing crisis.