Category: Culture

DDP Staff Wedding

DDP has a young staff and we are always having weddings of the staff, here in Phnom Penh and in the provinces.  The latest one was Mr. Heng Ravy, our Job Training Project assistant, who married Ms. Roeun Srey March.

Before the wedding: A Cambodian wedding, even a Catholic wedding, is quite different from a Catholic wedding in the United States.  Here is the sanctuary prepared for the ceremony.
Before the wedding: No organ for these weddings.  They usually do have an electronic keyboard and guitar but this one also had these traditional percussion instruments to accompany a blessing dance that was part of the event.
The ceremony lasted nearly two hours with various cultural additions.  Finally when it was over many of the congregation gathered for a group photo with the newly married couple.
Ravy the groom is our staff member and afterwards the DDP staff who were present posed with Ravy and Srey March.  The two women on the right are the only Catholic members of the DDP staff.

“Take an IV and call me in the morning….”

Just like aspirin used to be the one-size-fits-all medicine for the United States so an intravenous injection is the cure-all in Cambodia.  If a person goes to a doctor or a clinic and doesn’t get an IV, he/she feels like he’s wasted his money.  Need it or not, you’re SUPPOSED to get an IV!  People will go to a pharmacy and get an IV and administer it to themselves at home.  Here a family returns from a doctor visit for a (not visible) infant the mother is holding and like good parents they make sure the baby gets his IV on the way home!

“You want a straw with that?”

Here’s a truck loaded with about a gazillion straws.  It’s part of the culture here—probably because of an assumption that nothing you drink from is hygienic–that every drink is served with a straw.  You buy a Coke in a bottle, you get a straw.  You get an iced tea in a restaurant, you get a straw.  You order a glass of milk, a straw comes with it.  You buy a canned soft drink, a straw.  You buy a fresh coconut on the street, you get a straw.  This same truck loads up at the same shop 3, 4, 5 times a week.  They would put more on the truck but notice they are just now under the mass of wires above the load.

Lunar New Year—Day 3 — #6

Today is the last of the three days of official celebration according to Chinese tradition–although there are NO official public holidays in Cambodia for the lunar new year.  Many families either relaxed at home today behind the closed shutters of their shops or continued visiting relatives and friends.  Click here to see these last new year photos.

They get the point…

Most of the time most Cambodian men wear sandals rather than shoes.  When they do wear shoes, though, it’s not unusual to see them in long, pointy-toed styles that may have come from A Thousand and One Nights.