Author: Charles Dittmeier

DDP Staff Wedding

DDP has a young staff and we are always having weddings of the staff, here in Phnom Penh and in the provinces.  The latest one was Mr. Heng Ravy, our Job Training Project assistant, who married Ms. Roeun Srey March.

Before the wedding: A Cambodian wedding, even a Catholic wedding, is quite different from a Catholic wedding in the United States.  Here is the sanctuary prepared for the ceremony.
Before the wedding: No organ for these weddings.  They usually do have an electronic keyboard and guitar but this one also had these traditional percussion instruments to accompany a blessing dance that was part of the event.
The ceremony lasted nearly two hours with various cultural additions.  Finally when it was over many of the congregation gathered for a group photo with the newly married couple.
Ravy the groom is our staff member and afterwards the DDP staff who were present posed with Ravy and Srey March.  The two women on the right are the only Catholic members of the DDP staff.

Keeping Cool in Cambodia

There are many signs that Cambodia is moving into the 21st century—paving sidewalks, jamming the streets with cars, erecting tall buildings–but there are also indicators that Cambodia still hasn’t made the jump from a simple village life style to a modern city environment.

When I first came, I don’t remember one shop on the main street that had an enclosed front.  Each store had a pull-down metal shutter that, when opened, revealed the whole interior of the ground floor.  Then slowly one shop after another started to have a glass front, a normal doorway, and it was no longer possible to drive motorcycle or car into the store at night.

As the shops were enclosed, they needed air conditioning and it’s spreading, but it’s still at its earliest stages.  New modern buildings often have individual stand-alone AC units sticking out like warts all over the exterior.  This KFC at least has put all the units in one place, but central air conditioning’s time has not yet arrived.

Topic: Wood #1

What I call TOPICS are different aspects of Cambodia life and culture that I think deserve a fuller treatment than just one post on this page.  Topics will have their own pages and the posts here will point to those pages.  This is the start of a Topic treatment about wood in Cambodia, a commodity that is the focus of a lot of society and is much in the news.  Click here to go to the main page about WOOD.

“Take an IV and call me in the morning….”

Just like aspirin used to be the one-size-fits-all medicine for the United States so an intravenous injection is the cure-all in Cambodia.  If a person goes to a doctor or a clinic and doesn’t get an IV, he/she feels like he’s wasted his money.  Need it or not, you’re SUPPOSED to get an IV!  People will go to a pharmacy and get an IV and administer it to themselves at home.  Here a family returns from a doctor visit for a (not visible) infant the mother is holding and like good parents they make sure the baby gets his IV on the way home!