
One of the nice things about Cambodia and its tropical climate is that there are always plants and trees that are blooming. There is such a variety of colors and blooms and smells!
Charlie Dittmeier's Home Page
One of the nice things about Cambodia and its tropical climate is that there are always plants and trees that are blooming. There is such a variety of colors and blooms and smells!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Cambodia is 94% Buddhist but there is an element of Chinese influence visible throughout society. Here on a typical Khmer street is a small Chinese temple which doesn’t exactly blend in architecturally but is an accepted part of the neighborhood.
Since there’s confusion in the reporting about the present epidemic:
• CORONAVIRUS is a type of virus
• SARS-CoV-2 is the exact virus going around
• COVID-19 is the disease it causes, and
• “WUHAN VIRUS” is racist.
Lent…that space where we look, first of all, at what we set out to be, and then look consciously at what we are now doing to get there.
~ Joan Chittister, OSB
.
Today we had a celebration of women at our DDP office grounds and it was a fun event even though on a smaller scale than in the past. Click here to see what was going on.