Charles Dittmeier – Welcome to Cambodia, and…..

Practice for Christmas Greeting

On their break this morning, students in DDP’s Education Project made a quick little video to offer Christmas greetings on the Maryknoll Lay Missioners website later this month. They just signed “Merry Christmas” and “Happy New Year” in Cambodian Sign Language.

Sunday afternoon….

For many months our Deaf Community Center could not have any activities because of the Covid regulations. Now Cambodia is officially “open” and groups are allowed to gather again as long as they wear masks, use sanitizer, and maintain distances. The past two weeks DCC has started organizing games and activities on the weekend, and there has been a good response from deaf people who felt very isolated in their homes.

This afternoon at the Deaf Development Programme office grounds, one group–mostly DDP staff–played volleyball while another group, mostly students, chopped up ginger for meals this week. Yesterday teams of deaf people cleared brush from around our fish pond so a new fence can be installed, and this morning the DCC staffed taught everyone how to make a traditional Khmer dessert.

For most of the deaf people who came by this afternoon, it was just a quiet time to be with friends and to chat and rest up from a busy week.

Peacemaking

IDPD

Thinking ahead….

If you need a simple little gift to give students or coworkers at the office at Christmas time, these little bags of cookies might be what you want. Bishop Olivier has a social enterprise, CoCo de Takeo Cambodia, that employs the poor and people with disabilities to create all sorts of things to eat and to use from coconuts and all sorts of natural materials.

These cookies are 500 riel a bag and they are actually good! Bishop Olivier gave us some at the last priests meeting.

If you would like to order some, contact Mr. Miek Son at +855 10 956 250 (phone, SMS, WhatsApp). I’m going to order some. I’ll let you know how it goes.

You have been warned!

So many things in life are relative–important to one person, trivial to another, etc. Reacting to the weather is one area of relative perception. In my state of Kentucky in the US, reaching 15ºC is cause for celebration–summer has arrived. Here in Cambodia reaching 15º is cause for government health warnings!

Getting it right….

Giving Tuesday, for DDP

I went to check what the tech wizards at Maryknoll had done with the video I sent them about DDP—and it didn’t come out the way they said it would! The proposal was for me to send a video that they would edit into three sections for the Saturday, Sunday, and Monday before tomorrow’s Giving Tuesday.

Instead it looks like they used the whole enchilada, all 26 minutes of video except for some transitions and introductions I had included.

You can take a look at: www.maryknollsociety.org/givingtuesday/

Something in Firefox or in the Maryknoll webpage won’t allow me to put a clickable link here so you will have to click on the address above and then copy-and-paste it into your browser address line. Sorry about that!

Thanks for any help you can give!

New Church: One more step – 2

Here are a couple additional photos from yesterday showing more what was going on.

Bishop Olivier blessing the plaque that goes on the cornerstone.

Laying the first of the foundation stones.

Giving Tuesday, for DDP

I’m not that familiar with Giving Tuesday (that started after I left the United States) but two weeks ago the Maryknoll priests group contacted me to say they wanted to feature the Maryknoll Deaf Development Programme here in Cambodia in their Giving Tuesday appeal. I made some videos for them and they were supposed to start posting them over this past weekend.

Here is the link: https://maryknollsociety.org/givingtuesday/

There was a still photo there when I checked on the weekend but I encourage you both to take a look at the videos (we were trying to explain more about deafness) and to make a donation. We are in a bad situation because of reduced donations to our funders because of Covid-19.