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Today we had our usual Wednesday meeting of Maryknoll Cambodia followed by a liturgy and dinner together. The meeting was not unusual but for the mass we had five visitors–Marist Brothers in Phnom Penh for a regional meeting–in addition to our usual crowd. The usual crowd when I first arrived in Cambodia was 25-30 persons every Wednesday. “Usual” now is 7 people. It was a delight to have a bigger group gathering together tonight.
This is a neighborhood pagoda (wat) getting its gates repaired or replaced. These compounds dot the city like Catholic parishes in a US city and are often the same size, taking up much of a full city block.
Cambodia has made some real improvements in its drive to move from a least-developed country to a medium-developed country. Not all improvements have been substantive and enduring, though. Take electrification. Just five or six years ago only 27% of the country had electricity. Today many more people have power–most of the time.
Sunday night some time after midnight I woke up and realized the power had just gone off. My fan was off and the white noise machine was silent. I figured there was nothing I could do about it and went back to sleep. Then the power coming back on 3 1/2 hours later woke me again because it made my electric alarm clock play a jingle.
Then in the Khmer Times newspaper we got this little article where the electricity company apologized for some error that knocked out the lights for all of Phnom Penh (1+ million people) and the surrounding counties and even Siem Reap 200 miles away.
When I got up I took a shower but then the water went off. It turns out the loss of electricity knocked out the water system, too!
The trees of Phnom Penh have been tortured and disfigured over the last century–and many of them did not survive–but some are still making a strong effort to keep going with new shoots and branches. It says something about the in-built striving for life that is part of creation.
