Charlie Dittmeier's Home Page
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.
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.
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.
The post on Christmas Day had a bad link because I forgot to “publish” the page that the link went to. It’s working now if you want to back to Christmas Day and click there again. Sorry!
Many countries utilize tuk-tuks (motorcycle-pulled wagons or bench seats) for local transportation and Cambodia definitely has its share of them. Click here to see how the styles have started to evolve.
You’ve been reading about the hot spot in the Pacific near New Zealand and the very high temperatures in Australia and the flood waters in Venice. Well, things are pretty bad here, too. In the article above, the government weather bureau is “warning” people that the temperature is going down to 17º to 19ºC. That is 62.5º to 66.2ºF! So there! Things are difficult here, too!
Large-scale storm sewer construction is going on around Phnom Penh and it’s actually starting to show results. Some areas of the city that used to flood two or three times a week during the rainy season now may flood only a couple times in a month. Phnom Penh is not so good at doing road work: the locals don’t know how to notify the community of the work, how to reroute traffic from streets that are dug up, how to finish a job in three or four days instead of three or four months, etc., but at least there is some progress.
Being a Buddhist country and culture, there is very little Cambodian appreciation of Christmas in the religious sense, but as happens with so many Western holidays and celebrations, the commercial aspect comes into play. Few people could identify Christmas as the celebration of the birth of Jesus but those same people would buy red “Santa suits” to dress up their children. They become especially popular for “international” schools which have Christmas programs to prove they are international which is the label that attracts parents. Here are some photos of shops selling the Santa clothes.
