Charlie Dittmeier's Home Page
Many of the tuk-tuk drivers come from the provinces to earn money when not planting or harvesting rice but they have no place to stay and sleep in their tuk-tuks. They often gather the tuk-tuks together at night for protection and at first I thought this was such an encampment. But noticing that all the tuk-tuk seem to be the same, I’m wondering if this finance company has their own fleet for their business?
Last year this intersection had each of the four corners sequentially fenced off as these stanchions were created for a major pedestrian overpass to give students safe access to a large secondary school to the right of the photo. Then Covid-19 came. The school is closed but they could have finished the work on the overpass. For some reason, they didn’t.
Hey, Cambodia has reached the Big Time now–we opened our first 7-Eleven store yesterday. People—spacially distanced–stood in line out in a pouring rain to be part of the first-day crowd. There are plans for another 5-10 stores in the kingdom in the near future.
In the “new” Maryknoll office, I live upstairs. It’s not fancy but basically clean and certainly meets all my needs. It looks like the landlord recently replaced the sink faucets and shower heads in the bedrooms.
Look at the water coming out of this new faucet! It sprays in all directions, even over the edge of the sink so that your front gets wet while washing hands. The spray comes out with force and wets not only the sink and the person but even the wall behind the faucet.
I took off the spout of the faucet thinking there was something lodged in the opening to make it spray so wildly, but, nope, that’s the way it was designed!
From the graph, it looks like Cambodia is on the road to recovery. Not exactly. The government admitted this week that the sum of new infections in all the provinces is greater than the total for that day announced by the Ministry of Health. Thousands of Cambodian migrant workers have been coming back across the border from Thailand day and night, legally and illegally. Anything after the official announcement time of 6:00 PM just isn’t recorded.
For all the years since we started having a Sunday mass at St. Joseph Church in Phnom Penh, every time Fr. Bob Wynne and I would leave by the back gate of the compound, we would look into this recycling hub where trash collectors would bring in and sell the recyclable rubbish they found while making their rounds. Their open front and the church gate were opposite each other.
Then after an absence caused by Covid-19, I came back and found a difference. The recycling hub–just an area under a large metal roof–was gone and there was a “For Rent” sign on the gate.
Because we have not been able to have masses at the church because of the prohibition on in-person gatherings, it was a while before I again went back to St. Joseph. When I did, I saw that something was afoot: a new metal roof had been put up.
And then a month later we now have a typical Cambodian drink shop. If you look closely, in the back corner inside the shop there is a wooden structure where the new proprietor lives. Around the house part is plenty of space for parking the family motorcycles inside. And up front there are the drinks and snacks for sale. The open area on the right, behind the umbrella, used to be a wall but that was removed to give more access. We’ll have to see how this new establishment develops.
Last week, because the border with Thailand was closed for two weeks, the numbers of daily new infections in Cambodia dropped from 900-1000 per day down to 500-600 per day. But then last Friday the border was reopened and now the numbers are going back up.
But even with new cases coming across the border with returning migrant workers, the number of active cases in Cambodia has gone down slightly, probably the result of more vaccinations in various provinces. Bad news and good news.