Category: Daily Life in Cambodia

Street Scenes

Street scenes from the Tuol Tum Poung area. (Clockwise from upper left:) 1. Two identically dressed women selling small clams from the Mekong River. 2. Maybe the smallest market in the world, a three-foot strip of land outside a wat. 3. A little girl being reassured at the appearance of a monk on his daily begging rounds. 4. A motordupe (motorcycle taxi) driver waiting for a hire at a fruit stall.

Cool Hand Luke?

Anyone watching might have wondered whom this man was talking to if they observed him waiting with his motorcycle-pulled ice wagon on the street near World Vision. Closer inspection, though, might reveal the head of the three or four-year old son who is hunkered down in cool comfort next to the blocks of ice in the wagon. Maybe he’s his father’s helping hand? Or more likely, he probably has to ride with his father all day because they don’t have money for day care.

Who you gonna call?

While the Wuhan coronavirus is making the headlines and causing disruptions around the world, the bigger problem at DDP is mosquitoes. Recently we have had a second big infestation of the insects and today we sent the staff and students home early and a pest control company came to fog our grounds and our buildings to hopefully reduce the number of the little nasties.

A Typical Home

To me this photo captures quite accurately the style and tone of life in urban Cambodia now. This is a shophouse, where the main room opening on to the street is a business space and behind it and above it is a living space for the family. The father, a tailor, works at his sewing machine with material samples, sewing supplies, and completed garments set around the work space. In the lower right corner is a bag of charcoal for the charcoal stove with a big pot on it. Is the burner for cooking? Or with such a big pot, are they making some sort of snack like those on the table, a small sub business selling snacks to customers and passersby? Maybe that is the wife’s contribution to maintaining the family–in addition to mothering and cooking and cleaning. In the upper left corner is a little shrine for making offerings to placate the ancestors. Whatever the circumstances, there is a way to make do, like the wooden block under the leg of the steel table to level the table on an uneven floor. And then there’s the little boy, the well-dressed son (his father IS a tailor!) who just watches the world go by and figures that all this is just normal and the way the world should be.

Mindfulness

In Cambodia there are a couple dozen Catholic pre-schools and kindergartens, many established for Vietnamese community children to help them integrate into Cambodian society and culture. There is no system of Catholic schools in the kingdom, though. The Jesuits have started creating a pre-school to university educational setting in rural Banteay Meanchey Province, and as usual, they do a super job with education. These are some of the primary school students at the beginning of the day when they have a period of silent meditation. There probably aren’t many settings in the United States where that could happen.