Church – Page 17 – Welcome to Cambodia, and…..

Another year…

Normally during the period of Holy Week and Easter I post here photos of our Holy Week services at St. Joseph Church. That pattern was disrupted last year by the appearance of COVID-19 in Cambodia which caused the cancellation of our services with just a week’s notice.

At that time we thought…”Next year will be different and we’ll be back together.” But that didn’t happen. Instead our Covid situation in Cambodia is much worse this year than it was in 2020, and so once again we didn’t have any liturgies to show you here.

What we do have is this:

The government is really getting worried now about COVID-19. In the first thirteen months of the pandemic, we had 375 infections up to February 20th. Since then, because of some suspected playboys and infected prostitutes who flew in on a private plane, widespread community transmission has started and as of today we have increased to 2,700 infections in just six weeks.

The government’s response has not always been the best. The upper newspaper in the photo talks about all the people in the past year who have escaped from quarantine facilities because of bribery, incompetence, or lack of attention. The second newspaper talks about a newly instituted curfew from 8:00 PM to 5:00 AM. Cambodians don’t go out at night so it may not be that effective, but then the punishment for violating the curfew is just to have your motorcycle impounded for two weeks.

Fasting in Lent–and always

Latter Day Saints

I don’t see them as often as I used to but the missionaries from the Latter Day Saints (the Mormons) are around in Phnom Penh–always in pairs, always in black and white, always on bicycles.

Almost Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday is tomorrow and in preparation I spent part of Sunday afternoon burning old palm to make plenty of ashes. I’m thinking we may need more than usual because this year we are to sprinkle them on a person’s head rather than mark a cross on the forehead. We have plenty of palm trees on the grounds of the deaf office and I found a lot of fallen fronds so that wasn’t a problem. [The three white bandages on my right leg are from three dog bites I received on Thursday. More on that later.]

A reunion at DDP

Today four of the Salesian Sisters from their commercial training school in Tuol Kork came to visit DDP. One of the purposes of the visit was to reconnect with Phany (C), a former student who is now the new social worker at the Deaf Development Programme.

CACD Meeting

The Catholic Alliance for Charity and Development (CACD) meets quarterly, and today the meeting was at the Caritas Cambodia national training center in Takhmau. About 45 people from various Catholic NGOs and agencies attended.

At the end of the meeting, Bishop Olivier gave gifts of appreciation to those who served last year on the CACD steering committee.

Christmas 2020

Our Christmas celebration for the English Catholic Community was very different this year–as was almost everything in 2020. Click here to see some photos from the Christmas masses we celebrated.

Christmas 2020

We are having seven Christmas masses spread out over four days, December 24-25-26-27, to give more people a chance to celebrate Christmas with the faith community. For these masses we have reintroduced some liturgical practices we haven’t seen since March. We are saying the Gloria and starting to sing an opening and closing song and also for Christmas we are incensing the nativity set and altar at the beginning of all the masses.

Prepare the…Christmas celebrations

In the past week or two, church workers at St. Joseph Church where we have our English mass have been putting up platforms and other structures in preparation for Christmas.

Now the platform on the right is ready and will be the site first of a Christmas liturgy and then later a Christmas party for the neighborhood.

Wired for Sight

Partly because we want to be able to use visuals in our liturgy and partly because we cannot use paper missals and song books during the pandemic, we installed a video system in the chapel that we are now using for our English community masses.