Author: Charles Dittmeier

New Cabinets for a New Year

A big problem in the tropics is termites and we had them big time in our kitchen cabinets and in the door frame to the right of the man standing on the left above. Finally the landlord decided to tear out the old cabinets which was great except for three days of thick dust when they also jackhammered off the wall tiles.
We had no cabinets for almost three weeks and then suddenly on New Year’s Eve a work crew shows up and installs the cabinets above. That’s a simple sentence but the work wasn’t. The top photo shows them making the cabinets on the kitchen floor–more dust!—and the bottom photos shows them on New Year’s Day after they finished sanding and staining them. Now maybe we can get back to normal in the kitchen.

Water Meter

This is a corner of the front yard of the present Maryknoll office we are renting. It’s an unpaved corner where our guards grow aloe vera, bananas, pineapples, jack fruit, or whatever else strikes their fancy. The circle draws your attention to the water meter for our house, just sticking up out of the ground, a little bit near the fence, but not really trying to be out of the way.

There are no Cambodian wiring and plumbing codes–at least none that are enforced–so everything like installing water to a house is done by your brother-in-law and he puts the meter wherever he feels like it. Or wherever the plastic pipe that he brought extends to.

This is a close-up of the water meter. It’s set and half buried in a mound of concrete, out in the open where anyone can fool with it. Note that, oddly, there is a cut-off valve on either side of the meter!