Author: Charles Dittmeier

“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.

“Cold” Weather

                                            Staff at the Deaf Development Programme

The last two nights the temperature in Phnom Penh has gone down to the low 70ºs F and all the expats are rejoicing.  All the locals, however, are complaining that they are freezing.  Some are wearing fur-lined coats with hoods.   Considering that the normal temperature is in the low to mid 90ºs, they have experienced a considerable variation and they don’t have a closet full of winter clothes.  90% of the population don’t have a closet.

The prime minister offered advice(?) about the cooler conditions:

“Please, do sports activities in the morning for health.  For the soldiers stationed at the border, you need to take care of your health and wear coats to protect yourself in order to avoid infectious diseases.”

Christmas Season 2017 #5

Every year in Advent and Lent we have a communal reconciliation service, offering the sacrament of reconciliation.   This Advent, for the first time we decided to have the service at the Maryknoll office.

Fr. Bob (at the lectern) planned this evening’s service.
These services are generally not well attended but this year we had a few more people than we did in Lent.  Using the office instead of St. Joseph Church was an attempt to make it easier for people to participate.

Education Conference

This is a conference on inclusive education for children with disabilities sponsored by the NGO Education Program.  It brought together this past week a lot of civil society and non-government organizations to look at the situation in Cambodia.

It looks like a normal organization meeting in any hotel in any major city anywhere, but this one had its Cambodian characteristics.  Cambodians thrive on noise–loud noise–and they always turn the PA systems up very high–and leave them at that setting.  Their technicians do not adjust the volume for each speaker as he or she comes to the podium.  The volume stays on high all the time.  And then speakers come up and yell into the microphones.  If we were in the United States, OSHA would require ear protection for everyone in the room.  Here the locals just consider it normal—and it is in this culture.  We foreigners consider it painful.