Charlie Dittmeier's Home Page
This is a doctor’s waiting room. Note the heavy wooden furniture! This furniture is the goal of every business operation. Acquiring the 100-pound chairs on the left means you have arrived. You are the real thing, whatever your business is, be it a dentist office, a car wash, a bank, a metal fabrication shop, whatever. The Cambodian culture is obsessed with luxury woods that bestow respect and esteem upon their owners.
On this street corner in Boeung Tum Pun, you can have your phone repaired while you’re at the dentist.
This is a corner of the front yard of the present Maryknoll office we are renting. It’s an unpaved corner where our guards grow aloe vera, bananas, pineapples, jack fruit, or whatever else strikes their fancy. The circle draws your attention to the water meter for our house, just sticking up out of the ground, a little bit near the fence, but not really trying to be out of the way.
There are no Cambodian wiring and plumbing codes–at least none that are enforced–so everything like installing water to a house is done by your brother-in-law and he puts the meter wherever he feels like it. Or wherever the plastic pipe that he brought extends to.
This is a close-up of the water meter. It’s set and half buried in a mound of concrete, out in the open where anyone can fool with it. Note that, oddly, there is a cut-off valve on either side of the meter!
When Cambodians want something to quench their thirst, their go-to drink is a fresh coconut. It’s refreshing, not overly sweet, and really healthy–and cheap. Not long ago I posted a photo of a man selling coconuts from his cart. There you can see the big, thick husks of the coconuts as they come from the trees. The one above has been chopped with a machete to remove most of the husk and then rounded off with an electric grinder to make it even more attractive and easier to drink. Not a bad deal!
There’s a whole lot of coconuts here! And there’s a whole lot of demand for them. Cambodians would much prefer to buy a coconut to drink on the street rather than go for a Coke or other soft drink.
