Category: Culture

Musica Felice

Ms. Miwako Fujiwara is a musician with our English Catholic Community and she is also the founder of Musica Felice, a classical choral group.  On September 10th, Musica Felice had a concert at the Sofitel Hotel in Phnom Penh.

The first half of the concert was very classical, warm, well-loved traditional choral pieces performed by a chorus recruited from various churches and from the general public. Miwako conducted.
The second half of the concert had similar music but it was performed on traditional Khmer musical instruments.
This traditional Cambodian instrument is a Cambodian harp which had to be built from old pictures and diagrams.

Pchum Ben 2017

Pchum Ben is a religious holiday celebrated in Cambodia on the fifteenth day of the tenth month of the Khmer year.  It is a time for Cambodians to pay their respects to the last seven generations of the their deceased ancestors.  The last three days of the Pchum Ben period are a major public holiday when everyone goes to his or her home village.  This year the holidays are September 19-21.

There are many rituals associated with the festival although most do not come into full play until the holidays when the populace flocks to the wats (pagodas) to pray.  Leading up to those holidays, many people, especially the elderly make visits to the wats and make offerings of lotus pods.  These are pictures of women on the streets bunching the pods together for sale.

These two women are working together, the one on the right tying the bundles and the one on the left stacking them up. Notice they also have pomelos for sale.
This woman contributes to the line of women near the royal palace selling the lotus buds. This woman is lucky to have her husband there to supervise.
This poorer woman doesn’t have all the chairs and coolers and other things but she has the basics to prepare the lotus flowers for sale.
This woman is happy with her work. I don’t know what is the white fruit or vegetable or ??? that she is also selling on the left.

Difficult Cultural Differences

I just sat through a two-day review of the National Disability Strategic Plan organized by the United Nations Development Program.  I’m not sure how much good such large scale (200+ people) reviews accomplish but at least a few good ideas were aired.

Such meetings are conducted in Khmer with simultaneous translation for all the United Nations people, foreign consultants, and others who wouldn’t understand Khmer.  That’s standard procedure.  The difficulty is that it is part of Khmer culture to always use a microphone, even for a small group (ours was large) and to turn it up almost as loud as it goes.  A typical large meeting in Cambodia had a noise level that would literally be illegal in the United States unless people were wearing ear protection.  What makes it especially difficult is that we foreigners have to listen to the English translation through the headphones but the ambient noise is so loud from the PA system that it is sometimes almost impossible to understand the interpreter even when we are wearing the headphones right over our ears!  Two days of that is really frustrating.

Remaining French Heritage

There isn’t a lot left in Cambodia to reflect the long colonization by the French.  French bread–baguettes–is surprisingly plentiful and popular on the streets, and all the doctors write prescriptions in French–which basically people don’t understand, but, hey, this is Cambodia, why should a patient understand what she is taking and why.  Around Phnom Penh there are still some beautiful remnants of French colonial architecture but many of them are disappearing fast.  This is one old French-era building that has been preserved as a reminder of bygone days.

Cambodian Anomaly

Here the young woman in red (and three other unseen compatriots) pass out paper advertising fliers to motorcyclists stopping for a light at an intersection.

The anomaly is that no one throws them on the ground!  This man has folded his and put it in the rack on his bike.  This goes against everything normal in Cambodian culture.  People throw trash on the ground and out of car windows all day long.  People at restaurants throw straws and white crumpled paper napkins on the floor or on the ground until the area under the table looks like a snow-covered field.  But in this one case, at the stop lights, people don’t throw the papers down even though it’s something they basically probably don’t want.  Strange….

Pleasing the Spirits

Spirits are a big part of life in Cambodia and the basic stance is to keep them happy.  First, you honor and respect the spirits of your ancestors and provide what they might need in the spirit world.  Then you placate–or buy off–the less friendly spirits.  Some spirits in this neighborhood are rather well taken care off:  they have incense above and then a cake and glasses of maybe coffee and apple juice arranged for them.

Going Fast

This is an old traditional wooden house a block from the Maryknoll office where I live.  There aren’t many of these left in the city where they have been replaced by concrete dwellings or even by multi-story apartments and office buildings.

Topics: Wood #12

I did a series on the uses of luxury woods in Cambodia in February and then decided I had said enough about that for a while.  But when on the priests retreat recently, I noticed how much luxury wood was used in the church in Sihanoukville.  Click here to see some photos from the sanctuary.  Scroll down to No. 12.

Preference for the Floor

This woman working in a curtain shop illustrates a cultural aspect of life in Cambodia: much of life here is lived on the floor.  Poor rural families could not afford tables, chairs, etc.—and didn’t have houses that would support furniture (remember most of the houses were bamboo slat floors on frames up on stilts)—and so the people cooked, ate, slept, played, and worked on the floor.  Those people moved to the city and continued the same life style so that it is common to see people sitting on the floor doing any number of different jobs.