Author: Charles Dittmeier

New Year’s Eve 2017

Today was a busy day with Holy Family Sunday masses this morning in two places and then dealing with St. Vincent de Paul Society cases in the afternoon.  Then this evening the Maryknoll Cambodia community got together for a new year mass and dinner together.  It was a quiet and enjoyable evening and everyone was gone by 7:00 PM.  Here Ann Sherman and Russ Brine talk with a visitor, Beau Blank, who works with Maryknoll in Thailand and has spent the last four or five days with us.

Visitors from My Past

This evening at the Saturday night mass at World Vision, I met a group of twelve people from Hong Kong who are finishing up a service trip in Cambodia.  They have been working in a parish in Kampong Cham Province.  In talking to them I found out that these two young men went to the Bishop Ford Primary School in the Tung Tau Tsuen area in Kowloon.  I lived at the Bishop Ford School for twelve years before coming to Cambodia, but I was gone before these two started the first grade there.

Christmas Season 2017 #9

I wasn’t planning on any more posts about Christmas 2017 but yesterday–Christmas Day–it rained!  That is unheard of!  When I first came to Cambodia, the common wisdom was that the rainy season ended in October.  Through the years it has seemed to rain later and later in the year, and this year it rains on Christmas Day!  Call it climate change or whatever you want, but CHANGE is happening.

“Cold” Weather 2

This was the longest stretch of cool weather that I have experienced in seventeen years in Cambodia.  Each night for four days the temperature dropped another degree or two celsius.  Granted here in Phnom Penh it was only down to the low 70ºs F but for Cambodia that’s COLD!  And the locals felt it.  I felt it, too, taking a shower in the morning with no hot water.

This man tries on a hoodie sweatshirt at a streetside vendor, and in the background the lady in the red helmet is looking at a sweatshirt for herself, too.


Three motordupe drivers heavily dressed as they wait for rides.
More motordupe drivers and a security guard with a muffler and gloves–at 73º.

Christmas Season 2017 #6

Charlie and the landlady with her DDP khrama

We don’t celebrate Christmas at the Deaf Development Programme because this Buddhist country makes no connection between Christmas and the birth of Jesus and we don’t want to introduce the commercialization of Christmas and Santa Claus into the culture.  But today we had an unplanned Christmas party thanks to the generosity of the landlady of our DDP office building.  Click here to see what happened.

NSSF Signup

Cambodia has the beginnings of a social security system, being implemented in three stages.  A couple years ago the first phase was introduced, offering compensation for employees injured on the job.  Now the second phase is coming into play, a general health-care plan.  Today all the 150+ Maryknoll project employees had to come to the Maryknoll office to sign up and have their ID pictures taken.

The neighbors must have wondered what was going on as a mass of people descended on the Maryknoll office located on a rather quiet street.
Once inside, each staff member was photographed against the white background and then issued a National Social Security Fund ID card. It was surprisingly out of character for a government office to set up this registration site for us rather than forcing each employee to visit two separate sites to submit documents.