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Last Sunday it was double parking, lots of vendors, and hundreds of people crowding the big wats in Phnom Penh in anticipation of the Pchum Ben rituals.
Now, in the middle of the three-day holiday for Pchum Ben, the wats in Phnom Penh are devoid of people. The locals are, for these days, in their homes and in the wats in the provinces where they grew up. Phnom Penh is largely deserted.
Today is the first of the three days of the official Pchum Ben holiday. Most people have already left town, but there are always some whose departure is delayed by their jobs or other circumstances. This morning here were some of the late-departers cramming themselves and their belongings into an overcrowded van for a trip that can’t be too enjoyable but is just part of life for the majority of the populace who depend on this kind of transport.
Tomorrow is the first day of the three-day public celebration of the Pchum Ben Festival honoring deceased relatives, but prayers and various activities started a week and a half ago. This past Sunday many Cambodian people took the opportunity to visit a wat to make offerings and say prayers for their family who have gone before them in death.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Many people take their lunch to work in Cambodia and here they tend to use a traditional metal carrier with several compartments. Click here to see some of the variations.
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….
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.