Housing in Malaysia

I was fascinated by these houses built on stilts alongside the Sandakan Harbour. I was told that they were built about 40 years ago as a form of affordable housing.

Apparently swarms of shrimp would swim in every so often and residents would just jump in the water - the water was only waist high - and collect as many as they could. Sounds cool, except you can imagine what the toilets in these houses were like. Yup. Hole in the floor.

Look carefully at the junk on the shore in the top picture. The grassy area is about five feet above the sand, and in this picture it hides a ten-foot swatch of litter along the entire shoreline. The first morning I was there I saw a boy about 10-years-old barefoot by the side of this litter struggling with a metal can that came up to his chest. He was collecting scrap metal.