Author: Charles Dittmeier

Topics: Oranges

I have mentioned before that one of the ways to tell the seasons here is to note which fruits are being offered on the street.  That’s one of the only real indicators since it’s always hot and everything is always blooming.  Now it’s the turn of the oranges to appear.  Most of them are from Battambang, renowned for oranges, and they are all green in color, not orange.  They are good, though, and once in season, many vendors are selling the oranges by the kilo (about $1.75) or as bottles of freshly squeezed orange juice.

This young man is squeezing orange juice right on the street.
Selling oranges is not difficult. All that is needed is the small platform, six or eight inches off the ground, that is widely used. And then if you are selling orange juice, too, you need the squeezer and the cooler to keep the juice cold.
This woman has already been hard at work and has her orange juice out on display.
This man has lots of oranges and lots of empty bottles piled up behind him, and probably the family is inside squeezing the juice.

 

 

Topics: Health #1

Medical practices vary tremendously around the world, depending on the education and literacy levels of a society, the resources available, the level of government attention, etc.  Click here for a glimpse at one medical practice in Cambodia.

Going Fast

This is an old traditional wooden house a block from the Maryknoll office where I live.  There aren’t many of these left in the city where they have been replaced by concrete dwellings or even by multi-story apartments and office buildings.

Choose by Size, Not by Style

When you buy your shoes on the street like this, you choose by size, not by style.  For any given style, there may be only two or three sizes offered–maybe only one, so you try on the different styles that fit and then pick the pair that you like best.  These places do a lot of business.

Topics: Wood #12

I did a series on the uses of luxury woods in Cambodia in February and then decided I had said enough about that for a while.  But when on the priests retreat recently, I noticed how much luxury wood was used in the church in Sihanoukville.  Click here to see some photos from the sanctuary.  Scroll down to No. 12.

Another Farewell

Once a month, lay missioners from a variety of countries come together for fellowship, discussion, and community.  Joining them this past year has been Denis, a seminarian from Kenya.  Now he is preparing to leave to return to conclude his studies and the lay mission group gave him a goodbye gift.  Miyuki (yellow) presented the gift while Yessica and Clara looked on.

Another Hole

Recently I posted a picture of a deep pothole near my house.  Or maybe it would be more accurate to call it a sinkhole.  It opened up in a hole several feet deep.  Today I ran across another one.  The local populace is really good about trying to mark such disasters-in-waiting but the question is why they keep appearing on roads that have relatively recently been paved?  This is the third hole within a mile of my house.  Does anyone in officialdom notice these?  Do they actual do anything about them, as in requiring the contractor to come and repair it?  Or telling the street department to do it?  There’s no sign of such initiative.

Scene from Daily Life

It’s laundry day for the guard at our house in Phnom Penh.  He’s lucky because he can use our washing machine although he still has to line dry his clothes because I have never seen a dryer in the kingdom.  Washing clothes is a typical scene, here and around the world.  Peculiar to Cambodia would be the spirit house for those ethereal beings displaced when our house was built and the helmet at the base of the spirit house, turned sunward to kill the lice.

Notable Quotes

 

“Trump is not a rupture at all, but rather the culmination — the logical end point — of a great many dangerous stories our culture has been telling for a very long time. That greed is good. That the market rules. That money is what matters in life. That white men are better than the rest. That the natural world is there for us to pillage. That the vulnerable deserve their fate and the one percent deserve their golden towers. That anything public or commonly held is sinister and not worth protecting. That we are surrounded by danger and should only look after our own.”

~ Naomi Klein / political analyst

[NB: there are two posts today. Scroll down.]