Author: Charles Dittmeier

Just the skeleton…

This is a typical house in a Cambodian city, what is called a shophouse. It’s one room wide and this one has four floors. The lot it is on would be about 15 feet by 50 feet. In many countries the ideal house is on a good-sized piece of land away from the city center. Just the opposite in Phnom Penh. A house like this one will do just fine, thank you, the fulfillment of a dream.

Work from home

The coronavirus pandemic has spread throughout the world and is certainly a presence now in Cambodia. Overnight our number of infected people doubled from 12 to 24. We had already been working on a DDP plan to help control the spread of the virus, and early in the morning our management team finalized a work-from-home policy. In the afternoon we gathered all the Phnom Penh staff on our porch (to minimize contact and provide more ventilation) and we explained the policy, who is to work where and how, and then sent them home for the next four to eight weeks. Who knows?

Carmelite Sisters

In all of the excitement and turmoil that goes on in Phnom Penh and Cambodia and the world, the Carmelite Monastery in Phnom Penh is something of an island of quiet and serenity. The sisters go about their daily routine of prayer and work mostly oblivious to all that is happening outside their convent walls.

That serenity was disturbed recently as a young woman professed her first vows there in the process of becoming a Carmelite Sister.

Bishop Olivier presided over the ceremony. Before the mass, he conferred with the superior of the Phnom Penh Carmelites about the order of the service.
Quite a large number of people from Phnom Penh came to monastery–about twelve miles outside the city–to celebrate the profession with the sisters.
Sr. Marina (3rd left, with white veil) is a young woman from Korea who made her first profession at the ceremony.
The Korean Church has been very involved in and supportive of the Cambodian Church. There are quite a few Korean sisters and priests in the country and many of them came for the ceremony. Here some of them gather for a photograph with Sr. Marina’s parents.

Surprise…but not too much…

This is part of an emergency e-mail we sent out to the 591 people who subscribe to our English community e-mail newsletter. World Vision surprised us this morning with a phone call saying we cannot use their auditorium, which we rent for mass every Saturday evening, until after the Khmer New Year which ends on April 16th. We did a lot of scrambling, a lot of texting and e-mailing to notify as many parishioners as we could that there would be no mass tonight. Now we have to figure out what to do for the weeks ahead.

Flat Tire

On the way back from a 6:15 AM mass across town, the motorcycle taxi I was riding had a flat tire. We were right in front of this “gas station” so my driver asked the guy to fix the flat but he said he was too busy doing whatever he’s doing above.
He did fill the flat rear tire with air to see if the leak could be located, but that didn’t help and my driver went down the street and found another motorcycle taxi to take me the rest of the way home while he searched for a place to repair the tire.

Windows Haiku

You know those error messages that pop up too frequently in Windows, the ones like 404 (Page not found)? Well, now there is an alternative if you would like to be informed with a little more poetry. Take this one for example:

Three things are certain
Death, taxes, and lost data.
Guess which occurred.

The Old Days

I was going through some old photos for a project for Bishop Olivier and I ran across this photo of our Saturday night mass when we used the Russian Cultural Center in Phnom Penh. This was in the year 2000.