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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….
Buddhist holidays can mean a bit of money if you’re in the right place with the right product. On the last special day for Buddhists, this young girl was pulling a cart full of coconuts, decorated with incense sticks and lotus blossoms, to be sold as offerings to place in the wat (temple). She probably wouldn’t make a lot of money but the dollar or two she probably earned would be a big help to her family.
She looks a lot more comfortable than he does!
Coming from US culture where anyone can be sued for anything with the least provocation or cause, it continually amazes me how it is standard procedure here to take off your shoes (required by Cambodian culture) and then just leaving them right in the middle of the doorway or on the steps themselves if there is a set of stairs. It has never dawned on the culture here that stepping out of a doorway onto a mass of shoes, sometimes several layers deep, could be dangerous and might cause an accident. This is the scene at the Maryknoll office on Saturday morning when the kids are inside for religious education.
The Ministry of Mines and Energy announced that by the end of this year, 88% of villages and 75% of households nation-wide will have access to electricity. The lack of available, cheap electricity has been a major drag on the country’s development and industrialization. The ultimate goal is for 100% electrification by 2020, with the power coming from hydropower plants, coal-fired plants, and some biomass-fired plants and solar farms. It’s an ambitious goal but a vitally important one.