Charlie Dittmeier's Home Page
Today I was riding home in a tuk-tuk and it started to rain. Within fifteen minutes the streets were flooded–and it wasn’t even raining that hard. What is it about Phnom Penh? They keep installing storm sewers–and the streets keep on flooding.
A few days ago I needed to consult with a dermatologist about a lesion I could feel in my hair on the back of my head. When I arrived at the doctor’s office, I found that he had a microphone and speaker attached to the outside of his glass door so that he could speak with the patients without their coming inside the office. Here a mother with a child speaks to the doctor who is not really visible through the Christmas decorations still on his glass door from nine months ago. I was allowed to come into the office but only into the waiting room where he checked my head. He was being super cautious about Covid-19.
Most of our staff are working most of the time from home but the Education Project and Sign Language Project staff are at the Deaf Development Programme at least one or two days a week to make videos. Some of the videos are for our education students at home and some are for public announcements about the Covid-19 situation. The videos get posted on DDP’s Facebook pages.
Here are Soknym, the DDP Program Manager, and Fr. Charlie at the Ministry of Social Affairs today where we handed over a ton of rice to the ministry for distribution to people in Covid-19 “red zones” where they are not allowed even to leave their houses to get food. There the government delivers rice to the houses every day or two. That is the rice behind us. I thought a ton of rice would make a bigger pile!
Today we had a scaled down celebration of Deaf Day. In other years we had 200-300 deaf people come together for this event but with the pandemic, we had to limit participants to a minimum. Click here to see some of the events of the day.
In his remarks to the Global Summit on Covid-19 this week, Prime Minister Hun Sen noted that Cambodia has achieved the vaccination of 79.1% of the total population of Cambodia. Around 80% is considered the threshold for herd immunity, but we’re still counting between 600 to 700 new infections per day. That’s a really bad figure for us and makes us wonder if we have herd immunity or not? Or is it just the presence of the Delta variant?
When there is only one electrical outlet in a room and when that outlet is located at eye level on the wall, there is a need for a LOT of extension cords.
