Author: Charles Dittmeier

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.

Planning Meeting

About every eighteen months, the Cambodia Mission Team–the members of Maryknoll serving in Cambodia—has a planning meeting to examine what we are currently doing and to examine the signs of the times and what is going on within Maryknoll and in Cambodia that might require a response.  This year we met on a government holiday when most of us could be available.

Sr. Len (on the sofa), our country representative with the government, planned the day and began with a series of questions to help us reflect on where we are at this point in time.
There was a lot of discussion, usually starting with small groups, and then time for feedback.   Here Russ Brine notes a point from a discussion of Maryknoll Lay Missioners in Cambodia.

Christmas Season 2017 #1

Cambodia is 94% Buddhist and especially outside of the cities there is little understanding of Christianity, and Christmas—which people will have heard of–will be seen as just a western holiday where the foreigners wear Santa Claus costumes and decorate their homes with evergreen trees and lots of ornaments and lights.  Christmas is not celebrated throughout the culture at all but most western families and groups will mark the birth of Christ with church services and parties at Christian-based NGOs.  Click here to see how the English Catholic community began its Christmas season.

Not yet….

Electricity is still not a given in Cambodia.  I think now the percentage of the population with access to electricity is about 34% and where it is available, it is quite expensive.

Cambodia is now buying more electricity from Vietnam and the supply is more reliable.  Previously because the grid was so weak and the price so high, air conditioning was a luxury and was never part of the original design of a building.  Now it is still a luxury but more and more people feel they can afford it so external air con units are appearing in more and more places.  Here fifteen of them have been added to the top floor of a residential block.  Individual units are now not such a rarity but it will still be a while before architects think of central air conditioning for a building here.