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There are no enforced traffic or safety rules in Cambodia, either for drivers or for passengers. Anything goes. Today we were driving to Kampot Province and saw this little girl standing in the back of a truck on the highway. At least she’s holding on–and has something to hold on to!
Every the Don Bosco Vocational Training Center for girls has a Christmas Bazaar and I’ve been going for eighteen years. It is a fund-raiser for the school but also just a fun event that involves all the girls in reaching out to the community.
This morning I was riding a motorcycle taxi (a motordupe) across town to our 10:00 AM mass, just like I do every Sunday, and I was thinking it was strange that this microfinance place was open on Sunday.
Then it dawned on me: “This isn’t Sunday! It’s Christmas!” and I considered how it’s just like a Sunday with all of us off from work and going to mass and that I would have the afternoon after mass to catch up on some paperwork.
Then it further dawned on me: “Wait! This isn’t Sunday! And it is Christmas, but it’s a work day in Cambodia” where 94% of the population is Buddhist with zero interest in Christmas and the birth of Christ. As I saw this woman dusting off the wares in her little shop, I realized that this afternoon after mass I would be heading back to work at the Deaf Development Programme. “It’s Tuesday!”, just an ordinary Tuesday and an ordinary workday for all of Cambodia except for the few of us Catholics who had a service on Christmas morning.
We had our second Christmas mass at St. Joseph Church this morning. We had to bring the crib and nativity set from the Korean Diakonos Center where we used them last night. Click here to see some pictures of our congregation today.
Our Christmas Eve service this year was held at the Korean Center. We had a very good turnout and had to add extra chairs. Click here to see some of our arrangements.
Normally we have most of a week to take down the Advent decorations and replace them with Christmas trimmings, but this year the last Sunday of Advent was today and tomorrow, Christmas Eve, is the beginning of the Christmas season so we had to change the church environment today. Click here to see the crew that gathered for the task.
The understanding of Christmas isn’t very deep in Cambodian society and most outward signs of the season are commercially driven and geared toward children.
We are in the rice harvesting season now. Click here for some photos of farmers drying their rice crop.
In this Buddhist country, probably a good number of people would know that Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Jesus—but they wouldn’t know much about who Jesus is. And the greatly larger portion of the population would associate Christmas with Santa Claus and Father Christmas rather than with Jesus. Santa Clauses are everywhere. They sell things. Jesus is nowhere to be seen.
Some church groups get caught up in this cultural confusion. At the Catholic school where I have mass on Fridays, they contribute to the confusion with this nativity set to which a Christmas bear and Father Christmas have been invited. Maybe I should be satisfied that at least the manger is still empty.
When Maryknoll first moved to its office on Street 320 in Phnom Penh, down below my second-floor window was a little village of ten one-room units, two strips of five units each facing each other on one house-sized lot. Access to this little community was through a narrow alley leading out to the street.
Shortly after we occupied the house, the owner of the little village moved everyone out, tore down the two strips of one-room apartments and put up a three-story metal shed in which he set up a metal fabrication company. They made steel gates, doors, and railings and such–with a lot of banging and grinding.
Now that little plot of land is being subjected to more change. The four-story building facing the street (behind which is the lot) is being extended back over the lot to make the building longer. The sheet metal walls of the fabrication shop have been removed and it seems walls of brick and concrete are being extended from the existing house to make new walls around the lot below my window. Here is a picture of a young man using a torch to cut away some of the scaffolding that held the metal walls before.