Flavors of Saffron

This evening we had a blessing for the new Flavors of Saffron restaurant opened by a Pakistani refugee family who just recently arrived in Cambodia after fleeing religious persecution in their home country.  I have worked with quite a few refugees in my years in Cambodia but have never seen a family work so hard and so fast to get themselves established and in control of their own lives.

A Day’s Wages #2

A couple days ago we had a photo of a woman with a scale she carried around, weighing people for a few cents each.  Not far above her on the economic scale is this woman with a stack of khramas (scarves) and other cloths that she is selling.  She probably pays a deposit for the cloths in the morning (and maybe rents the bicycle along with them) and then walks all day to sell a few items.  Will she make two, three, four dollars in  day?  How much of that can she keep?

A Day’s Wages

Cambodia is trying to get its economic ranking raised from low-income country to middle-income country, and by some standards, progress is being made.  But then you see people like this woman.  She rents a scale and then walks the streets all day hoping to weigh people who may give her 3¢ to 5¢ for the weighing.  Here she is counting her money.  Will she have enough to buy food at the end of the day?

Even the church…

We don’t get Christmas carols on the radio starting with Halloween (we don’t get ANY Christmas carols on the radio!) but we do get some decorations around the city.  Today I was at St. Joseph Church in Phnom Penh and found workmen setting up a LARGE artificial tree and a grotto/ manger on the church grounds.  I’m glad they do big, bold expressions of our Christian Christmas practice but, hey, it’s not even Advent yet.   Couldn’t we wait a couple weeks to set all this up?

Racism

A Declaration against Racism  by the Archdiocese of New York
We are… resolved that there can be no acceptance of the moral positions regarding race, faith and culture espoused by White Supremacists, Neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and similar groups which advocate for the superiority of white persons and the inferiority of persons of color or for the superiority of Christians and the inferiority of non-Christians. We declare that these groups, by virtue of their moral positions, are anti-Catholic, anti-Christian and that they act against the ideals articulated in the foundational and governing documents of the United States. There can be no acceptance of these racist, xenophobic positions within the Catholic community in America.  […or anyplace else.]