In terms of migrant squalor on the Thai-Myanmar border, life on the Mae Sot rubbish dump is the most graphic. Trucks roll in to dump their rubbish. Even as it falls an attendant throng carve into it with their sickles, breaking open bags to reveal rotting waste commingled with potential treasure: bottles, cans, metals, steel wire, copper wire, a broken helmet, an amputees foot. 

Families build shacks on the rubbish, using scavenged materials to clad bamboo frames. Toddlers are left to themselves. Older children join adults searching for anything of value. 

The smell to the unaccustomed is overwhelming, no better in hot season than rainy season when rotting, maggot infested mud make conditions particularly grim.

Photos of this life can be hard to look at: a population surviving upon a town’s detritus. But this is not the whole picture. Speaking to the residents over many visits, there are recurrent themes. There are no bosses on the dump, no one forcing you to work a 10, 12, perhaps 16 hour day as can be the case in Mae Sot’s factories. And at the time of this series, factory labourers typically earnt $2-3 per day – 60 to 90 baht. Scrounging on the dump, average earnings are typically no less than this although on a lucky day 150-200 baht could be earnt.  And the children are attracted to the work for the two reasons: a desire to contribute to the family income and a natural curiosity in seeing what they might find during the day. “It is more interesting than school,” says one.

One day a bomb goes off at the dump. Residents are injured. The official explanation is that insurgent fighters from across the border had dumped the bomb in a bin so that it would not be found by Thai police. The bomb found its way to the dump where it was detonated. A nearby migrant authority, however, says the bomb was planted by authorities to scare off the dump residents who had been attracting increasing attention from international organisations and media. It reflected poorly on Thailand. 

The dump vacated but after a few weeks, life on the dump had resumed.