The shack's uneven and lumpy floor is made of hard-packed dirt. There is no indoor plumbing, and the nine residents shared a hole in the ground for their toilet.
"If it rains for like two or three days in a row, the water gets into my house," Keng, 39, says through an interpreter. "When it's flooded, the water level is high, above my ankle." Keng says her family had been living there for five years, and they were desperate to move to a better home.
But if they had walked into a regular bank in Cambodia, or just about any country in the world, and asked for a mortgage to buy a nicer house, executives mostly likely would have turned them away.
Keng and her husband both work. She makes and then sells rice soup at a street stall, while her husband sells clothes at another stall. But they don't meet one of the crucial requirements for getting a mortgage: They don't receive salary slips or other financial documents, so they don't have what bankers call "verifiable income."
Late last year, Keng heard about an unusual bank called First Finance, which was designed specifically to give mortgages to low-income people like her. She and her family could already imagine the new home they wanted to buy: a two-story house with indoor plumbing. It would cost about $20,000.
"I have always wanted to live in a nice, beautiful house, but with my business, with my small, very small business like this, I never expected I can afford to buy a house," Keng says.
A New Kind Of Bank For A Changing Country
The First Finance mortgage program in Cambodia was the brainchild of Talmage Payne, a 45-year-old American. His parents worked as eye doctors in Nigeria, so he grew up wanting to help low-income people in poor countries. When Payne graduated from college in the early 1990s, he moved to Cambodia to work with the refugees of the fighting between the government and Khmer Rouge guerrillas.