Author: Charles Dittmeier

It’s Not My Job….

Recently there has been a flurry of street paving in our part of town.  It’s getting close to local elections and the ruling party wants to show its best side.  Before the pavers got to Street 105, though, two really deep holes had developed on two successive street corners.  Apparently water underneath the pavement had washed away whatever foundation there was and a hole developed, straight down, at least eighteen inches deep and ten inches wide and extending who knows how far under the pavement.  When they first appeared, the populace did what they usually do, stick a tree branch into the hole to make it more visible.

But then the street pavers came along.  Now their job is to pave the street, not repair it, so they just paved around the hole.

A DEEP hole in a busy street. With no more tree branches around, someone covered it with a piece of cardboard, perhaps thinking the contrasting color might alert motorists to the danger.
Probably after some motorcycle or bicycle crashed into the hole, someone then put these bags of trash on the edges of the hole as a warning.

Lunar New Year—Day 3 — #6

Today is the last of the three days of official celebration according to Chinese tradition–although there are NO official public holidays in Cambodia for the lunar new year.  Many families either relaxed at home today behind the closed shutters of their shops or continued visiting relatives and friends.  Click here to see these last new year photos.

They get the point…

Most of the time most Cambodian men wear sandals rather than shoes.  When they do wear shoes, though, it’s not unusual to see them in long, pointy-toed styles that may have come from A Thousand and One Nights.

A New Era

A headline from the New York Times

 

We are living in a new and unprecedented era, one in which the President of the United States knowingly, repeatedly lies before the nation and the world.  Who would have thought we would come so low as a nation?

It is a dangerous and uncharted situation we find ourselves in, and we need to develop new strategies for survival.  One I have seen discussed by the heads of major journalism organizations–and which is illustrated by this New York Times headline–is for the media now to concentrate not on the content of what Trump says but on its truthfulness, and to call a lie a lie and not use euphemisms for it.

Cambodian Microbe Hunters

Dr. Peter Gilligan, Charlie Dittmeier, and Dr. Jim McLaughlin

Jim McLaughlin is a former Maryknoll Lay Missioner who helped set up diagnostic microbiology labs in Cambodia and then co-founded the Diagnostic Microbiology Development Program there.  He serves as president of DPMD and returns to Cambodia several times a year to mentor, advise, and teach.  He just returned to Phnom Penh with his friend Dr. Peter Gilligan who is the Director of Clinical Microbiology at the University of North Carolina in the United States.  Peter will consult and review the DMPD operation and teach the Cambodian staff and technicians and students who are making this new field a reality in the kingdom.  Here they are visiting the Deaf Development Programme.