Food collected by the Catholic Church for distribution to needy families.
The Covid-19 situation in Cambodia is getting worse. The numbers of infections are increasing in Phnom Penh even though we are in Day 12 of a two-week lockdown. And the government response has not been the best. They don’t seem to know what to do and don’t seem to be able to learn from the experience of others or even their own experience. Click on these articles from the Khmer Times to get a sense of what’s happening:
“The vaccine — whether it’s Moderna, Pfizer or… Johnson & Johnson — is our only path back to normal. Every expert says so. Unless and until we reach herd immunity, the virus will constrain our ability to get back to some semblance of what life was like before March 2020. The only other way we get there is if lots and lots more people get Covid-19 — like somewhere between 70% and 85% of the population. Which, if past is prologue, would mean a lot more deaths before we got to that point. Given those two choices, getting the vaccine seems like the better one!”
It’s Day 11 of a two-week lockdown, you can’t go out of the apartment, and it’s raining…. What do you do? This young couple enjoyed just sitting on their balcony on this Sunday afternoon.
The Cambodian government is having a difficult time dealing with the coronavirus. Last night, without any warning, they closed all the markets where the ordinary people buy their food. Families typically go to the market every day to get fresh meat, fish, fruit, and vegetables. It’s just part of the culture and they don’t have refrigerators. It’s going to be difficult for them.
With Phnom Penh under a lockdown, Bishop Olivier had a Zoom meeting for the 37 priests of the diocese rather than an in-person meeting. He wanted to find out how the various church communities are managing in this difficult time. [I’m in the yellow circle.]
Recently–as I foresee that the current lockdown in Phnom Penh is going to be extended beyond the initial two weeks–I started wondering about food for the future because it has become increasingly difficult to be out for anything. I asked Maria (L) if she and Kila had any experience ordering groceries online and she told me what she had done. And then today they surprised me with a food supply! I didn’t think they would be able to get out on the streets but they managed to get all the way to the Maryknoll office, where I am now living alone, and fortified me with enough basics for the next couple weeks. Thanks, Maria and Kila!
Last Thursday the government imposed a lockdown on Phnom Penh to control the spread of Covid-19. We won’t know for a while whether it is effective or not–and the government has implemented it very clumsily–but at least this morning our neighborhood was basically shut down. The street above is normally very busy at 8:00 AM in the morning.
The street was not totally quiet, though. Pong, a simple little bakery, was open with their guard outside. And the woman in the stainless steel shop may not have been on duty–she lives above the shop–but put out a few wares just in case someone desperately needed a drying rack for clothes.
I’m standing in a little street near our house where the street dead ends in a market. It’s a two-lane street but notice how a house has been built out into the street, completely taking over one lane. The house with the brick wall and the orange cooler in front is not supposed to be there but the builder of the house paid someone off or started with a little food cart there and then took off the wheels and put it on blocks and then put an awning over it and then closed in the sides and then…. until finally it is a full-blown house. Notice that once the first house was established, neighbors appeared beside them so that there are now three or four family structures there side-by-side. The Kingdom of Wonder….
This shop has a string up to keep customers from entering and it also displays a “Stop Covid-19” QR system poster for recording those coming to the shop.
A QR code poster for an NGO. A customer uses an app on her phone to scan the QR code, and her presence at this site at such and such a time is recorded in a government database.
More than 155,000 shops and institutions have signed up to participate in the “Stop Covid-19” program which seeks to record who visits a site in order to assist contact tracing if necessary should a Covid-19-infected person visit that location. When introducing the scheme, the government downplayed any concerns about privacy but there are no restrictions or limitations on the way the government can use a person’s personal information if the person uses her phone to scan the QR code at a store.
Human Rights Watch has warned: “Cambodia’s QR Code system is ripe for rights abuses because it lacks privacy protections for personal data. These concerns are heightened by the government’s stepped-up online surveillance of Cambodians since the outset of the pandemic, putting government critics and activists at greater risk.”
