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I write a column every two months in The Record, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Louisville. It has been about mission with deaf people in Cambodia, but now I have explained my returning to the U.S.
Click here for the link to this week’s article.
Every year I have asked the liturgy office of the Archdiocese of Louisville to get various liturgical books for the English Catholic Community in Cambodia. We had books for lectors and other ministers that were quite useful. Now that I am back in the U.S., I picked up the books in Louisville and yesterday shipped them to Phnom Penh via DHL. They have already arrived there, an amazing time since last year another service took 3+ weeks. But shipping the books cost 3 1/2 times their purchase price!
While we were eating dinner tonight, a UPS cargo plane crashed at the Louisville airport which is the world headquarters for the UPS air services. A UPS MD-11 took off for Hawaii and then immediately went down, impacting three miles from the end of the runway. It is still continuous coverage on all the local TV stations and very little is known except the plane had a full load of fuel for the 8+ hour flight to Honolulu and created a huge fireball when it came down in a little populated industrial neighborhood. The emergency alert system contacted all the mobile phones in the area. 4 people are known dead and 11 injured and those numbers are expected to rise. The Louisville airport is in the middle of the city and fears of toxic chemicals and a spectacular smoke plume moving across the city caused officials to establish a shelter-in-place order that included the Nazareth Home where we live, but just now the air monitoring agency has determined there is nothing to fear so that area has been reduced.
When I got my new e-bike—a top end Trek model—I didn’t pay much attention to any of the labels on it. But then a day or two later, I noticed it was made in Cambodia! I knew bicycles are becoming a major export from Cambodia but didn’t know they were making high-end models and I certainly never thought that I’d end up buying one of them in Louisville!
Turbulent skies as I left Phnom Penh. I miss it all!
Two weekends ago I went to Maryknoll, NY for the 50th anniversary of the Maryknoll Lay Missioners. Today is the third anniversary of Fr. Roy Stiles moving to Nazareth Home Clifton and he decide to celebrate a little.
Here is a typical Phnom Penh daily scene: the monks are making their morning rounds begging (collecting) food and money for themselves and the poor, and the delivery man is bringing (delivering) a bag of ice for a local shop.
In the United States, many girls’ dream is to be a cheerleader for their school’s sports teams. In Cambodian culture, where there are no school sports teams, the girls want to be apsara dancers.
Every Sunday adult volunteers work with really young girls to get them started in the classical dancing.
The owner of the apartment that I am borrowing asked me for some photos of it to see if he needs to make changes. When taking pictures of the living room, I noticed the difference in color in the chair on the left and its matching sofa on the right. I had the chair cleaned when my backpack leaked on it and that may have lightened the color. Now I think I’ll need to clean the sofa to see what that does.
Today I went to Russian Market to buy a few gifts for people I will see in Taiwan and Hong Kong and Macau later this week. The market is quite an experience as you might surmise from this photo.
Then it started raining–really raining–outside and water started coming across the floor from different directions.
The vendors don’t pay much attention to the rain coming through the ceiling except when it drips on their merchandise and then they have plastic sheets to cover the counters.
The rain certainly cuts down on the number of tourists, though, so all in all, it was probably not a good afternoon for the marketers.