Charles Dittmeier – Page 143 – Welcome to Cambodia, and…..

New Year Glimpses

Today is the last of the three days of major celebration for the Lunar/Chinese/Tet new year. Click here to see some scenes and notes from this year’s celebration.

Questions???

There must be a story behind this mother-and-son(?) duo riding down a main Phnom Penh street. Is that everything they own on that bicycle? Where are they from? Where are they going?

Today is New Year’s Eve in the lunar calendar and for the people in the chopsticks countries, the reunion dinner this evening is one of the most important happenings of the year. In non-pandemic times, everyone MUST return home for the meal together.

This is a Khmer-Chinese family next door to the DDP office compound. They are well-to-do by Cambodian standards. As I was going home this afternoon, they were arranging parts of their dinner (the roast pig) and offerings to their ancestors (the paper houses and car and the beer and soft drinks and fruit and incense). And they were well decked out in their traditional red outfits for this glorious night!

Religious Symbols

Some people have their bathtub madonnas, others….

“Hey, I’m getting by….”

It must be a headache having a 9′ by 9′ room as your motorcycle repair shop, but imagine also the hassle of just getting a moto up into the shop without a ramp. Talk about doing the heavy lifting!

Got you covered….

Whether it’s for the inside (of you) or the outside, this shop has you covered.

Getting serious about the Lunar New Year

You know the lunar new year is getting close when people start to put out their chrysanthemums. You can’t do that too early because they will bloom and fade before the holiday. Click here to see some of the early arrivals.

Close to dinner time

This woman is preparing for the supper time crowd, readying street food. The big pots are vegetables and meat to go with rice and then there are all sorts of grilled meat and fish.

Heading home….

The newspapers are reporting large numbers of migrant workers (Cambodians, working legally or illegally in Thailand) who are now daily streaming across the Thai-Cambodian border, legally or illegally. They earn about $10 or $11 a day in Thailand (which gives you a clue how low their pay would be if they were in Cambodia because they’re going to Thailand to get more money than here) but now there is a spike in coronavirus infections in Thailand and the workers are afraid for their personal safety and also many of the businesses that employed them have closed so there are no jobs.

This presents quite a problem for Cambodia because more than 80 of the returnees have tested positive. That’s one sixth of all the cases in the kingdom. And those are the ones who crossed at the legal checkpoints and were tested. Others sneak in through the jungle because they don’t want to be quarantined. It could be a perfect setup for a major infection in Cambodia.

Author: Charles Dittmeier