Charlie Dittmeier's Home Page
I will never be able to understand Cambodian drivers’ fixation with driving with one wheel over the dividing line on streets. Here my tuk-tuk driver has his left wheel hooked over the line. Notice two vehicles ahead, the car driver has his right wheel over the same line.
The Lunar New Year is January 29th, still a week and half away, but the preparations are in full swing even though it is not a holiday here. Many, many Cambodians claim some bit of Chinese ancestry, deservedly or not, and the Year of the Rat will be widely celebrated here.
Look at this mass of overhead wires on a Phnom Penh street. This is rather unreal even by Cambodian standards!
In a land where there are no building codes–or if there are codes, they are ignored, it can’t be too surprising to find an umbrella seemingly affixed to the front of a building ten or twelve feet above ground. Did it blow up there and get stuck? Did someone secure it in that position? Is so, why? Who knows!
As long as no part of your load is touching the ground, you’re good to go! But not everything that gets loaded on to a moto stays there. This man had his packages secured with packing tape but something gave way and he ended up in the intersection reloading his motorcycle.
Only 3.5% of Cambodian businesses are registered with the government. 88% of all workers are part of the non-formal economy. This picture shows what the non-formal economy looks like on a typical Phnom Penh street. The government tries to change that because non-formal workers are not protected by labor laws and do not contribute to social security systems.
The Cambodian government likes to talk about moving the kingdom from the least-developed country category to the moderately developed. They can point to all the high-rise buildings and expensive foreign cars and terrible traffic. But at street level, some things stay the same.
Here are three icons of the large majority of Cambodians who don’t live in high-rise condos:
• the young boy selling lotus pods to earn money for the family
• the roast geese for a special family celebration, and
• a moto food-delivery man.
In the Catholic liturgical year, today–the feast of the baptism of Jesus–is the end of the Christmas season and tomorrow begins the first day of the cycle of Ordinary Time for the church.
Today is the last day this Christmas creche will be displayed. Note the carved wooden figures, about 18-inches high. They are made from extremely dense and hard luxury woods from Cambodia and each is worth$300 to $500. These luxury woods are a sign of achievement and success in Cambodian culture. If you can acquire these, you are successful in life.
The Caritas Deaf Development Programme offers two years of really basic education and then a year of job training. New this year is the opportunity to learn baking and beauty skills with the Korean Mission Society (KOMISO). Today three of our students left the hostel at DDP to move to the KOMISO training center on the other side of town. They were a little anxious because this is the first time our deaf students have gone to live in a training center run by hearing people. It will be a learning experience for us all.