Author: Charles Dittmeier

Musica Felice

Today the choral group Musica Felice presented their summer concert. Many of their members are from the English Catholic community and a special addition to this program was blind and deaf young people, including deaf students from the Maryknoll Deaf Development Programme. Click here to see pictures from the performance.

Things don’t look good….

The headline “NGO says 60% of three to five-year-olds not schooled” is an indication of the poor state of Cambodian education. Cambodia has made significant progress over the last twenty years in reducing the number of eligible children not in school, but this week Save the Children published its global report on education with some terrible statistics for Cambodia: [1] 22.5% of children of primary and secondary school age are out of school; [2] 60% of pre-school and kindergarten-age children are not receiving any formal education; and [3] only 0.3% of the Ministry of Education’s budget was allocated for early childhood education.

Field Trip

This morning when I had mass at the Don Bosco Technical Training Center, these Year 1 students were preparing for a field trip in the Phnom Penh area. Their Year 2 compatriots had already left for a two-day trip to Kampong Som on the southern coast. The Year 1 girls were looking forward to a one-day trip locally that would show them the Killing Fields, the genocide museum, the palace, etc. Here they are getting some last-minute instructions from two of the teachers.

Where can we go?

For over a year the English Catholic community has been considering different options for our services on the weekend: how many liturgies, in what venues, at what times, etc. Today our committee looked at a university lecture room that was suggested as a possible mass site.

Seat of Government

This is a typical municipal building–maybe the equivalent of a county courthouse in the United States–located in Kampong Thom Province. There isn’t too much to these structures, just two closed offices, one on each side, and an open meeting area in between. This municipal building might be unusual because there’s a car parked there.