Category: Government and Society

Water Festival

The day after the Water Festival ended, life started returning to normal.

The street barriers were pushed aside. Gone were the 6.4 million tourists who jammed the waterfront. Only departing tourists were left.
On the river, a barge with a light display remains. On the shore just a tent frame and empty rubbish bins.

Water Festival

Saturday was the third and last day of the Water Festival.

Some of the smaller boats.
A monk blessing the boat rowing crews.
The final parade of the light barges on the Tonle Sap River
4 million people came to Phnom Penh for the boat races and other Water Festival events.
King Sihamoni presiding from a royal box on the waterfront.

Water Festival

Today is the second day of the Water Festival, a three-day holiday extravaganza. More than a million people come from the provinces to Phnom Penh to watch the annual boat races.

350 boats representing towns and villages all over Cambodia are brought to Phnom Penh to race against each other. More than 20,000 men–with a few women–paddle the boats along a 2-kilometer course.
Lots and lots of people crowd the waterfront for the races. Pigeons, too!

NSSF

This week an official from the National Social Security Fund came to DDP to explain to our staff about the rather new social security program in Cambodia. He spend three hours explaining the fund with a sign language interpreter for the deaf staff. The beginning of a social security program is a BIG step forward for Cambodia.

One Window Service

A much-publicized initiative of the Cambodian government a couple years ago was to start what they call “one window service,” that is, being able to accomplish one of the many bureaucratic tasks the citizens endure in one trip to one window rather than being shunted from office to office for one or many days.

This woman embraces the same principle in getting her coffee in front of the one window office: she doesn’t even need to get off her motorcycle