Author: Charles Dittmeier

A Sad Funeral

Recently one of our Nigerian parishioners was killed in an auto accident and today we had his funeral outside at the mortuary before driving to a burial site in a neighboring province. He leaves behind his Khmer wife and a five-month old son and a stepson.

Things to come…

This is the small chapel at St. Joseph Church where the English community will move in a week or two. We need to find a way to mount a projector and screen visible for the whole congregation, without destroying the esthetics of the chapel.

Staying alive

This is a mother selling some kind of confection outside the Boeung Keng Kang Market. Neighbors with more money rent a stall inside and pile it with clothes or shoes or backpacks or tools or…. This woman, with less money, gets up early, cooks deep-fried goodies, and sits OUTSIDE the market for free and makes a couple dollars a day for the family.

It’s going to be different!

We are going to have to move from our present hall where we celebrate mass to this small chapel at St. Joseph Church, probably in a couple weeks. We had planned the move at the beginning of the year but that was before social distancing started, so tonight after our 5:30 PM mass, we moved a bunch of chairs over to the chapel so we can arrange them tomorrow in different configurations to see how many people we can accommodate there with our new reality. [Thanks to all the parishioners who helped us move a chair or two!]

If the shoe fits,….

I’m not sure what I’m seeing here. This man has set up a little stand on the sidewalk beside the wall of a wat and it looks like he’s selling used sport shoes. But what are the black oblong things stacked up? Are they new soles that he can glue or stitch to a pair of shoes? They look awfully long, but then maybe he cuts them down to the shoe size. I’ll have to go by there again and see if he is still there and what he has on his stand.