Author: Charles Dittmeier

No more mud

This is the boys’ hostel at DDP House. Before there was broken pavement, poor drainage, and mud in the yard area. Now there’s new layer of cement.

Lower the ceiling?

On an inspection visit of our hostel for deaf students, a team from the Ministry of Social Affairs didn’t like that there was no ceiling above the dorm rooms but rather open space up to the metal roof twenty feet above. From my understanding, that design allows the hot air to rise well above the living area and also keeps the hot roof above the humans. They wanted a suspended ceiling, though, so now they are getting one. It will be interesting to learn from the students, when they return, if the rooms are now hotter or cooler.

Turn on the lights

Four or five days ago, a couple or three young men started digging a trench
along the south side of Street 320, the location of the Maryknoll office.
They have been digging ever since and today they finally started pulling
three large electrical cables through some PVC pipe they laid in the trench.

Doing what we can

Today the Catholic Alliance for Charity and Development (CACD) had an online meeting to review the church’s outreach in the Covid-19 pandemic. Caritas Cambodia has been organizing the outreach and presented really sad numbers concerning the great needs of the poor people. One group that has been especially hard hit are the inmates in Cambodia’s not-so-good prisons. This photos is of a group of prisoners receiving food aid. [Note the second woman in the middle row has her child with her.]

6-pack?

There are hundreds of garment factories in Cambodia, taking advantage of the vast pool of cheap (because unskilled) labor. Most of the garments go into containers at the factory and head straight for a cargo ship. But then there are the rejects, the overruns, the canceled orders, and all the other pieces that stay in Cambodia. Many of them get sold on the streets. You don’t buy a six-pack but rather a six hundred-pack of whatever it is!

Surprise!

I was rather surprised today to see a collage of photos of priests who are deaf and who work with the Catholic deaf community–and to find my picture in the latter category. I’m not sure who created this.

Priests Retreat 2

Today was Day 3 of the 2021 priests retreat for Phnom Penh. Our retreat leader is the head of the Thai Mission Society in Bangkok and the 40 priests are scattered throughout the southern third of Cambodia.

#2 and Finished

We—the members of Maryknoll Cambodia—were back at the same hospital this morning for our second vaccination injection.
Because Cambodia received only 400,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, it was reserved for the foreigners and the larger population received one of the two Chinese vaccines.