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No Egg McMuffins but plenty of other goodies for breakfast on the run. Note the cooking with a wood fire in the middle of the city where gas is available. The majority of the population uses wood for cooking. Imagine the toll on the forests when 10± million people use wood to cook meals three times a day.
Today the Phnom Penh Post published this photograph and a short article about a bulldozer which was destroyed by an anti-tank mine in Phnom Penh on the weekend. It turned out the mine was in a truckload of dirt hauled from one of the provinces to be used in a construction project near this Buddhist wat. The driver was thrown over the wall and suffered serious injuries but survived.
The last mines were put down forty years ago but they’re still killing and maiming. We average a casualty every four or five days–after four decades.
An earlier posting looked at how Cambodian people avoid the sun on their heads. This post today looks at how they avoid the sun on their arms. Click here to see some of their techniques.
It’s a good thing potato chips and prawn crackers don’t weigh very much or he would be cruising for a wheelie!
This is another in my Topics section where I can present several perspectives on some topic or characteristic of life in Cambodia. Today this is about the Sun and how people react to it. Click here to see some pictures.
Yesterday when I went to Tuol Kork for a mass at 6:15 AM, the second-year students were waiting outside for buses to take them to Kampong Som down on the coast. The girls at the technical school, run by the Salesian Sisters, come from poor rural backgrounds and many of them have never seen the sea or other attractions like Angkor Wat so the school builds trips like this into the curriculum.
Yesterday it was 93ºF in Phnom Penh, I believe, and this young woman was waiting at the light beside me. Notice the sweatshirt with the hood up under the helmet, the gloves, even socks with her sandals. And all the other women are like her, all bundled up to avoid the sun and dark skin.
Cambodia is seeking $406 million to accomplish the demining projects it has planned through 2025. The last mines were laid in the 1980s but we still average a casualty every five or six days from the estimated four to five million landmines thought to be still in the ground and from other ERW (Explosive Remnants of War) that is part of the landscape of much of the country. Between 1992 and 2017, 1,000,000 anti-personnel mines were recovered along with 25,000 anti-tank mines, and more than 2,700,000 pieces of ERW. There is still a lot of work to do.
Cambodia is a mix of cultures in some ways. Look at this street sign. First of all, the modern-type of highway sign for controlled access roads contrasts mightily with the chaos of Phnom Penh streets with their thousands of motorbikes, cars, food carts, bicycles, and pedestrians, each going his own way and doing his own thing. Then there is a mixture of languages on the sign: Khmer script and English language script. And beyond the Charles de Gaulle Blvd name, there is the French spelling of “Tchecoslovaquie” for Czechoslovakia. And then there is the KFC culture imposed over everything else. The Kingdom of Wonder….