Charlie Dittmeier's Home Page
Just a day or so after making the move to our new DDP office site, we had a staff meeting on the large front porch. Normally we would have used our meeting room but the staff complained it was full of mosquitoes–it was!—so we moved our first meeting in the new building outdoors and Sokly explained about some of our personnel policy.
Every month a number of lay missioners from various mission communities in various countries get together in Phnom Penh in a type of support group. For the February meeting, Sr. Len Montiel was invited to speak of her many years of experience in the kingdom. She is preparing to be reassigned with Maryknoll in the United States in March.
DDP has a Job Training Project and one of our placements for training of young deaf women is at Bi Salon, where ten of our students are trained in various parts of the operations of a beauty salon. Ms. Kem Khemara, a local businesswoman who spent seven years in Japan, owns the salon and has been the driving force in welcoming and training our students who have done very well under her tutelage.
Last week Khemara surprised us by bringing her stylists to DDP and cutting our students’ and staff’s hair in an impromptu salon on our new front porch. It was a wonderful experience, especially for many of the deaf young women who seldom if ever have their hair cut like that, and we sincerely thank Khemara and her staff for their generosity with their time and their talents!
Once the trucks were unloaded, the staff were eager to get settled in their new offices and work spaces. Click here to see the different offices.
Click here to see the unloading of the trucks at the new DDP office site.
On moving day we gathered at the old office and loaded two trucks that made multiple trips to the new office. Click here to see the activity at the old office.
A quote from two conservatives, Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution and Peter Wehner of the right-leaning Ethics and Public Policy Center, from an article they wrote for the New York Times:
The most troubling — and from our point of view the most disappointing — development of the Trump era is not the president’s own election and subsequent behavior; it is the institutional corruption, weakness and self-betrayal of the Republican Party. The party has abandoned its core commitments to constitutional norms, to conservative principles and even to basic decency. It has allowed itself to be hijacked by a reality television star who is a pathological liar, emotionally unsteady and accountable only to himself. And it has embraced presidential conduct that, if engaged in by a Democrat, it would have been denounced as corrupt, incompetent and even treasonous.
After a lot of thought and planning, it was time to make the move, and the first step was to box up everything in the old DDP office and get it ready for the moving trucks. Click here to see the activity.
After reaching an agreement with the landlord about using his property for the new location of the Deaf Development Programme, we started visiting the site to make plans. Click here to see some of the planning trips in October and November.
A wall is not a sign of strength and can never secure a nation. Only relationships can do that. ~ Rev. Traci Blackmon and Rev. Caleb Lines