Author: Charles Dittmeier

For practically everything in Cambodia, an ID photo is required. That’s true of ID cards, company and NGO badges, job applications, school IDs, training certificates. Everyone wants to see your face.

Recently I had to get a new passport and I decided to pay $1.25 and go to a photo shop instead of doing it myself. The U.S. Embassy now requires that passport photos be without glasses so I needed to get some made like that. There are hundreds of little photo shops all over town since everyone needs photos so it was easy to arrange. I just walk in, sit for a photo with the appropriate background, choose the final photo size, and wait ten minutes or so. Here a tech person is checking my raw photo for any problems before printing it.

Here’s where you get your fresh pineapple (husk already removed!), tamarind, and other fruits and goodies. And you can make your purchase without even getting off your motorcycle!

Some events really point out how two cultures think differently and express things differently. Notice the text says the bridge is 77.04% complete. In the U.S., an article would say the bridge is 70% or 8o% complete, or maybe that it’s 3/4 complete. But never would it say it is 77.o4% complete!

And how do you figure a bridge under construction is 77.04% finished? What are you measuring? The amount of time projected for completion? The tons of concrete used already? The length of roadway already laid? How much of the budget has been spent?
[Photo from the Khmer Times]

It is risky in Cambodia for a foreigner to open a bank account with only one name on it. If the person dies or is incapacitated or needs to leave the country quickly, it is almost impossible to recover the money from that account. As a back up, when I set up my ABA bank account, I got a debit card for it and gave it to Maryknoll Sr. Regina with the PIN. In case something happened to me, she could withdraw the money from ATMs.

I never used the debit card and when Regina left, she returned it to me. Recently I wondered where it was and when I found it, I saw it had expired. I put it in my pocket yesterday to go to ABA to renew it, but later in the day it wasn’t in my pocket.

Arriving at home, it worried me that someone could find it and try to use it. It was expired but it still worried me so I went to an ABA branch (they are open 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM every day in Cambodia!) and canceled that card and got a new one.

A few hours later I got a message from the DDP director. Our former social worker called him to say a tuk-tuk driver had found my card and wanted to give it back. And that’s what the driver did this morning. In the photo he is talking to our DDP guard.

I couldn’t understand all his Khmer but he seems to have found it in the street. It had my name on it but how he found out who I was and how to contact me, I still don’t know!