Charlie Dittmeier's Home Page
We had a heavy rainstorm this afternoon, right before I was to bicycle home. 20 minutes after it started, it was already over my shoes so I left the bike at the deaf office and took a tuk-tuk home. These two girls got a bit damp on their way home on the streets of the Boeung Tum Pun neighborhood.
This is the type of tuk-tuk I was in. My shoes were in water when I was sitting IN the tuk-tuk. I have never seen Boeung Tum Pun flood so deep so fast before.
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is the idea that a company should play a positive role in the community and consider the environmental and social impact of business decisions. (Business Development Bank of Canada)
Boncafe in Phnom Penh has taken CSR seriously and approached the Maryknoll Deaf Development Programme about training deaf people how to make coffee. DDP thought that was a wonderful idea!
The training at DDP was in two sessions on two different days, one day for deaf people from Kampong Cham Province and the second day for learners from Phnom Penh. Here Pakheday, the trainer, explains some of the basics of making good coffee.
Here he explains the hardware on the commercial coffee making machine. The goal of the training was to provide a marketable skill that the deaf people can use to set up their own businesses.
The training was hands-on and each student made one of the coffee varieties. The DDP staff suffered caffeine overload from drinking so many of the demonstration coffees!
Certificates were presented at the end of the day of training. Now the DDP Job Training Project staff will follow up with the trainees to see if they are able to capitalize on what they have learned.
On the third morning, without the students, the DDP staff made videos of all the coffee varieties and the processes for making them. The videos can be used for review and reinforcement of what was learned.
Going home from school can be different here….
The new church at St. Joseph Parish is moving along. Now much of the outer building is in place although enough is missing that it is hard to visualize what the final structure will look like. Here workmen load cement into a large tub for a crane to lift it to the rear of the building.
This tuk-tuk driver, a man, is wearing a hat that would be considered women’s fashion in the United States. He might recognize it as a woman’s hat and just doesn’t care, but more likely he doesn’t identify it as for a woman and just puts it on because it’s available and he wants a hat. It is not uncommon for men to be seen in Cambodia wearing styles or garments that would be considered feminine in the US, maybe in the western world. Probably they are not aware of how those garments are worn in the west and also, too, they don’t care. A lot of life here is focused on survival, and questions about aesthetics and propriety just don’t arise.
Bon Café is a socially-conscious business supplying hardware and coffee and accessories to the thousands of coffee shops in Phnom Penh. They have volunteered to teach coffee-making skills to interested deaf people who may be able to use that to create an employment opportunity. Today they had the first training session. Ten deaf persons learned about coffee making and Bon Café staff learned what a challenge it is to work with deaf people with sign language. More power to Bon Café!
This is what a common family home looks like in Phnom Penh. The building has four apartments, each one room wide. The ground floors have roll-up or sliding gates so that cars can be brought into the living room at night. Especially notable is the fourth floor–an open space with a roof. It prevents the heat of the sun from reaching the lower floors and makes a big difference in the interior temperatures.
The meeting was a good time for learning and discussing but also a great time for getting together as brothers and sisters.
Every year DDP tries to have an all-staff meeting away from the office to give the staff a chance to have fun together in addition to receiving updates and information about changes. In the past we usually went away for two or three nights, but this year, because of the budget cuts, we had a one-day meeting at a resort center near Phnom Penh. The meeting was quite good. Here Op Siphal, the Maryknoll office manager, explains the workings of the National Social Security Fund while Sreynuch interprets in sign language.
