Category: Environment

Trees: Struggling to live…

The trees of Phnom Penh have been tortured and disfigured over the last century–and many of them did not survive–but some are still making a strong effort to keep going with new shoots and branches. It says something about the in-built striving for life that is part of creation.

Regreening…

A really popular corner of our DDP compound is this volleyball court. In normal times, it gets a lot of use and the grass is worn away.
But the times are not normal now and with all our students at home in the provinces, the court is growing a new cover of grass.

Not a promising future…

Phnom Penh was once known as a beautiful colonial city with wide tree-shaded boulevards but most of that environment has been sacrificed to “progress,” more buildings, more people, and more traffic. Here is a surviving tree, minus many limbs but still leafy, but how long can it last growing up from a little square hole in the concrete?
50 to 75 years ago, this stump was one of the beautiful trees on a boulevard. Now it’s just a remnant, a reminder–for those who even see it–of what once was.

Remnant of Another Age

Probably most people passing by at street level don’t even know this tree exists. Its lower trunk is gnashed and scarred, its lower branches cut away, and it stands silently as a witness to humanity’s indifference to nature and beauty. Only its leafy crown proclaims its former glory and the long-gone stateliness of the colonial avenue that predated this now commercial strip.

Heavy weather

This is the rainy season in Cambodia, there is a tropical storm affecting a whole area of Southeast Asia, and we had a really heavy storm for about an hour this afternoon. I like rain and needed to go to the grocery so I ventured out when the storm was at its heaviest.

This is when I was coming home from the grocery and the actual rain has stopped falling. This is a really shallow area. When I was bicycling in the worst-affected areas, my foot and the pedal where six inches below the surface
The garbage collectors are on strike now and there are piles like this all over the city. Luckily this pile is in shallow water. In the deeper areas, the plastic bags of trash have gone sailing away in the rushing waters in the streets.
This section of street is about ten feet lower than the main road which was built up precisely to be a dike against flooding of large areas of the city. But now all that water collected on the elevated road flows down to streets like this and is under such pressure that it flows out of the sewers at this lower level.