Charlie Dittmeier's Home Page
Recently DDP was contacted by a local station’s producer who wanted to do a short segment on DDP and its work. Today he came to interview a couple of our staff and one of the deaf students. We hope to see the results on air in a few days!
This weekend as we celebrated the Third Sunday of Advent, we also included a memorial service for Br. Terry Heinrich who died three weeks ago. Click here to see photos from the service.
At World Vision, we rent their hall and so have to set up for mass every week and decorate the room with banners, candles, etc. When Fr. Bob Wynne was here, he made sure that the seasons were kept distinct and arranged all the changes in colors, banners, etc. Now that he is gone, things sometimes go awry.
Here is a picture of our Advent Wreath as we celebrate the 3rd Sunday of Advent. That’s great. But on the pillar behind the wreath, is a Christmas wreath, a decoration that shouldn’t have gone up yet. Today we were supposed to have violet banners hanging on all the pillars but….
This is the beginning of a new section to chronicle the moving of the DDP offices to the former Seedling of Hope grounds. Click here to go to the new home page for this section.
Every year at the Maryknoll office we put up a large Christmas tree that was given us several years back by a departing family. In the recent past, Fr. Bob Wynne did most of the work setting in up in his free time, but this year, after his return to the US, the tree decorating became a Maryknoll community event. We ended our usual Wednesday meeting an hour early and encouraged by some cheese and crackers and chocolate candy, the tree was set up and grandly decorated.
I took 400 new English Missals to World Vision on Saturday night for that community and we rather quickly got them put into the plastic covers with the music books.
Sunday morning I took 300 English Missals to St. Joseph Church and our crew of helpers joined right in to put the missals together with the songbooks in the old plastic covers. Here they are at work.
December 10th this year was the 70th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration on Human Rights. It’s a public holiday in Cambodia but that just means that the government schools and government offices and the banks are closed. Everything else is open.
This is the headline on the Phnom Penh Post on Monday, December 10. No one in the government of Cambodia would see the irony of the government forbidding–on Human Rights Day–a march celebrating human rights. It would disrupt traffic, said the government flunky with a straight face.
To make matters worse, today, the day after Human Rights Day, the newspaper announces that Cambodians enjoy “full freedoms”—except the right to peaceful assembly, that is.
“It’s kinda like one of those fully-flat First Class seats on Singapore Airlines….”
A group of parents in the English-speaking Catholic community have formed a Fun Play Group to allow their children to meet and be friends with other children in a fun atmosphere with a little prayer and reflection to help the children grow in a positive setting.
The group met Saturday night after the evening mass and a good time was had by all!
Because we have a multi-cultural congregation in the English-speaking Catholic community, we provide a paper missal that allows people to read the scripture readings when they are being proclaimed by the lector at mass. For 95+% of our congregation, English is their second, third, or fourth language so sometimes they don’t catch the full meaning of only the spoken word.
The new English Missals for the church’s new liturgical year got lost this year. They were shipped from Ho Chi Minh City on 14 November but we didn’t pick them up here until last Wednesday. Then today I took 400 of them in a tuk-tuk to World Vision where we have our Saturday night mass in their auditorium.
