Category: Daily Life in Cambodia

Impulse Eating

In the US, supermarkets put tabloids, chewing gum, and other items along the check out lanes so people might be tempted to buy these things on impulse while they’re waiting to check out. Here in Cambodia they have impulse food, like this cart full of small mussels from the Mekong River. You can be riding by on your motorcycle, see the cart, pull over, and without even getting off, you’ve got a bag full of shellfish to munch on.

Making do….

Sometimes we have leftovers when Russ Brine and I eat dinner together and then I try to take them to DDP for lunch the next day. I dump some rice in a plastic ice cream tub and dump the leftovers over it and put it in the refrigerator at DDP when I arrive. Then about 10:30 or 11:00 AM, I take it out of the fridge and put it out in the sun to warm up a bit. We don’t have a microwave at the office so this is the best I can do and it usually gets a bit above room temperature.

Lights Out

This is an all too common scenario on Phnom Penh streets–approaching an intersection and seeing the traffic lights not working. There’s always a question: Is it just the one light facing me that’s out? Are the lights out in all four directions? Are the lights out in the whole neighborhood? That’s not as big a question as it would be in the United States because a good portion of the driving public in Cambodia doesn’t pay much attention to the lights anyway. Stop lights are basically optional: if you want to stop, you do. If you don’t want to stop or wait the full time, you don’t. So this scenario with the light out isn’t much different from the scenario with the lights functioning.

Fruit to Go

This woman is taking home a load of sugar cane. The stalks get scraped clean with a machete, taking the thin bark off, and then the stalks are run through a wringer-like machine that squeezes out the sweet sugar juice that is a staple drink for Cambodians.
Right down the street this woman is paring pineapples, scoring them and removing the little dots or eyes. She also removes the cores and then offers them as an oh-so-fresh treat on the street!

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.