Category: Culture

A Mixture of Cultures

Cambodia is a mix of cultures in some ways.  Look at this street sign.  First of all, the modern-type of highway sign for controlled access roads contrasts mightily with the chaos of Phnom Penh streets with their thousands of motorbikes, cars, food carts, bicycles, and pedestrians, each going his own way and doing his own thing.  Then there is a mixture of languages on the sign: Khmer script and English language script.  And beyond the Charles de Gaulle Blvd name, there is the French spelling of “Tchecoslovaquie” for Czechoslovakia.   And then there is the KFC culture imposed over everything else.  The Kingdom of Wonder….

Something to Remember…

There are about 125 killing fields in Cambodia, actual fields where the Khmer Rouge took people to execute and bury them in mass graves.  There is a large killing field near Phnom Penh and it is a place that the tour groups all go–and they should.

Many skulls of the victims are stacked in a large memorial stupa on the grounds of the killing fields.  Around the stupa are large, weathered pits were the bones were dug up.

Some of the clothing of the victims has also been collected and is displayed on a wooden platform on one level of the stupa.  It looks like it was probably washed but is otherwise just in a pile as part of the permanent display.  And along the paths among the burial pits, more bones and articles of clothing keep working their way up to the surface.

Only a small portion of the clothing from those executed is on display. Much more is kept in a warehouse and up to now has just remained there untended.  Now, though, through a program funded by the US Ambassador, Julia Brennan (R) from Textile Conservation Services, assisted by Jackie, a graduate student from the University of Delaware, will sort, analyze, and preserve the stored clothing for posterity as another  reminder of the Khmer Rouge era.

Today Julia and Jackie were part of the weekly Maryknoll Cambodia gathering in Phnom Penh.

Education Conference

This is a conference on inclusive education for children with disabilities sponsored by the NGO Education Program.  It brought together this past week a lot of civil society and non-government organizations to look at the situation in Cambodia.

It looks like a normal organization meeting in any hotel in any major city anywhere, but this one had its Cambodian characteristics.  Cambodians thrive on noise–loud noise–and they always turn the PA systems up very high–and leave them at that setting.  Their technicians do not adjust the volume for each speaker as he or she comes to the podium.  The volume stays on high all the time.  And then speakers come up and yell into the microphones.  If we were in the United States, OSHA would require ear protection for everyone in the room.  Here the locals just consider it normal—and it is in this culture.  We foreigners consider it painful.

Christmas Season 2017 #1

Cambodia is 94% Buddhist and especially outside of the cities there is little understanding of Christianity, and Christmas—which people will have heard of–will be seen as just a western holiday where the foreigners wear Santa Claus costumes and decorate their homes with evergreen trees and lots of ornaments and lights.  Christmas is not celebrated throughout the culture at all but most western families and groups will mark the birth of Christ with church services and parties at Christian-based NGOs.  Click here to see how the English Catholic community began its Christmas season.