Author: Charles Dittmeier

It’s mango season

Mangoes grow everywhere in Cambodia and everyone with land has at least one mango tree in the yard. And if you have a mango tree, you need a mango stick–a long pole with something on the end to pick mangoes off the tree. Here the DDP house mother uses a 12-foot pole to pick mangoes that are not yet ripe–but are a delicacy for Cambodians.

Here is the business end of a mango stick. This pole just has a cut off plastic water bottle on the end of the pole. It works, though. Sreymom got three mangoes while I was watching.

What is it?

Many oddities and quirks show up in Cambodian culture and daily life and one never knows whether it is a US-based or European-based fad or whether it some novelty originated in Cambodia. I saw this face? design? under a car door handle recently. What is it an image of? Does it mean something? Does somebody think it’s cute? Who knows?

Everyone pitching in

On Sunday mornings, our English Catholic Community uses the same worship space as the Khmer community. The Khmer mass is at 8:00 AM and our mass is 10:30 AM, but the Khmer mass always go long so there is less than an hour between the masses. After their mass, a group of Khmer youth take up the mats they use for sitting on the floor and replace them with the red plastic chairs for us. After our mass, though, the youth are long gone so all of our congregation carry the chairs over to the side of the hall and stack them. Then someone comes and puts the mats back out for the 4:00 PM Khmer mass where again everyone sits on the floor. Notice that our English community have to take off their shoes because wearing shoes in a church or pagoda is a no-no for Cambodian religious people. (Have you ever gone barefoot to Sunday mass?)

Another departure

A couple weeks ago we celebrated a graduation for our education students and for a group of our job trainees. Today four of the job trainees finished their time at DDP and returned to their home provinces to set up their own barber shops.

The four barbers with the equipment supplied to them to set up their barber shops. They got barber chairs, the clippers and trimmers, and the hair washing chairs in the foreground.
This young man is packing up his supplies as the barber trainer and DDP staff speak with his mother.
Then it was time to load up vans and tuk-tuks for the ride home. We give the students bicycles to use while they are here and this man is taking that–and also an old barber chair we had thrown out (foreground).