CAMDOC

The Commune of Roeul

General Information

The Roeul Commune is located about 40 km NW of SiemReap, 8 km north of the highway A6 from Siem Reap to Bangkok. The commune covers an area of about 80 km² and counts 14 villages with a total of about 15,000 inhabitants. From the highway A6 there is about 5 km prepared and maintained gravel road up onto the community center, from there on all connecting roads are from rammed soil, in the monsoon season sometimes in extremely bad condition, i.e. the commune can only be reached with bikes or 4WD's. There is no infrastructure for electricity and water distribution, neither there are sewers for waist water. Most people use water from small deep wells for their daily consumption; on the average there is about 1 clean water well for 3.5 families.

Only very few houses, not even all schools, have a toilet, which is in general nothing more than a hole in the ground, covered by a toilet plate and a small shed built over it, to offer some privacy. Many people are therefore not familiar with basic hygienic behaviour.
Over 95% of the villagers get their small income from agricultural activities, mainly from working on the rice fields. Most families have small pieces of land for growing vegatables and fruits (bananas, mangos, etc) for their own need. Many have a cow, pigs and chicken.

Houses

Almost 45% of the people live in a simple hut with a palm leaf roof, while about 35% of the 'houses' have a zinc plated roof. 22% of the houses have stone walls or foundations of which a few have tiles on the roof. As mentioned before there are no sewers, there is no electricity and current water. Only 3% of the houses have a toilet, the majority of them in the village Trapeang Russei located along the main prepaired gravel road.

People

The attached table shows the devision of people over the several villages. As a result of the Khmer Rouge catastrophe, the number of people younger than 18 is about 46%. The average family counts 5.6 persons, the average income per family is lower than $50 per month.