Charlie Dittmeier's Home Page
The Deaf Development Programme is now under Caritas Cambodia, and every year Caritas has a long retreat with all the staff to build community, share the vision of Caritas, and just allow the staff to enjoy being together outside of work. Today almost 200 project staff traveled to the Catholic center in Sihanoukville for the retreat.
Today our representative and our advisor, both from the Finnish Association of the Deaf, were with us when the Deaf Development Programme met with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). It was a really good meeting that confirmed UNDP’s commitment to working with us.
In the past the Finnish Association of the Deaf and the Deaf Development Programme would meet together for a week in what was called the Annual Negotiations Meeting. That cycle was disrupted by Covid and we had no ANMs after March, 2019 until this week when Ms. Katarina Butera, our FAD representative, came to resume the yearly meetings.
Our first meetings were just the DDP management and Katarina and Colin Allen, a newly appointed advisor for DDP, and we used the meeting room in the DDP office building. Today, though, we had more staff attending for project reporting and moved our meeting to a larger room (where sometimes things like bicycles for incoming students can be stored.)
This is Siphal, office manager for the Maryknoll office which closed two weeks ago. He worked for Maryknoll for more than 30 years. When I moved out of the office ten days ago, I moved into a second house Siphal built ten years ago. It’s more than I need but my stay there should be temporary.
Siphal was so helpful over the years! He knew where places were, how to get there, how much to pay, how much to bribe the officials–and how to fix things. Here he is installing a new water pump for the house. The short vertical connection had 21 valves, connectors, angles, and pieces of pipe. He sketched it on paper, eyeballed it, and then proceeded to cut and assemble everything without ever once making a measurement with a tape or ruler. Quite a valuable man for Maryknoll over the years!
You know you’re not in Kansas anymore when the weather department issues an alert because the temperature will drop as low as 18ºC. That’s 64.4ºF.
For 30-something years, the Maryknoll Cambodia Mission Team met every Wednesday for a business meeting, a liturgy, and then a meal together. Now that the Maryknoll Cambodia NGO has been closed and we no longer have an office to meet in, it was decided that those who are interested could continue to meet and Maria and Kila volunteered their apartment as a venue.
