Charlie Dittmeier's Home Page
The Maryknoll Sisters seems to be on four or five acres of land, and with an environmental focus, the sisters are shifting away from grass and lawns that need to be watered, changing to cactus and other succulents that need much less water.
Today Sr. Arlene Trant, MM, took me to downtown LA where we visited Homeboy Industries, the famous project started by Jesuit Fr. Greg Boyles to give gang members a new chance at life. It is quite an inspiring place.
On my way back to Cambodia, I have stopped at the Maryknoll Sisters retirement home in Monrovia, California. Sr. Arlene Trant and I worked together with the deaf people of Macau and now she is administrator of this home. She has been inviting me to visit so I made this my first stop on the return journey.
I went to a local supermarket this afternoon, partly to buy some Coke and partly just to explore the neighborhood. It was interesting just being in a big supermarket after three years away.
The past two days have been really hectic. I’m sorry I didn’t get to post anything here.
Today I traveled from Louisville to Monrovia, California via Denver to stay at the Maryknoll Sisters retirement home for a few days.
In the morning John and Moya and I went to St. James Church for mass. One of the priests on the altar recognized me and welcomed me at the announcement time at the end. The two people who heard my name came up after mass and introduced themselves. One of them I took to Mammoth Cave with our St. Lawrence youth group back in the 70s and the other had two sisters I taught at Angela Merici High School.
After lunch my sister Mary tooks us to Parklands, a 4,000 acre park complex where she worked before retirement. It is a 100-year concept: in 100 years Louisville will have grown out to the park now beyond the suburbs and it will be a park within the city. It is beautiful with a silo lookout tower, miles and miles of heavily wooded trails, a stream for kayaking, and many places for people to be immersed in nature.
In the evening cousins who had met the night before at a center were invited to gather at the house of Julie and Eric for another family event. Their house just that day had been part of a ten-house tour of significant houses. Eric is an architect and designed their home. It is a wonderful place to live.
In the afternoon I met with John and Joan, a delightful couple who are donating money to the Maryknoll Deaf Development Programme after recent budget cuts. They have had mission experience themselves so they could really understand when we talked about the problems of DDP.
