Category: Government and Society

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

Caritas Cambodia Retreat 2024 / Day 4b

After lunch, we started the roundabout return journey to Sihanoukville with a first stop at a huge statue of a man and a woman celebrating a marriage famous in Khmer mythology.
Not far from the statue is this bay which is the home of the Ream Naval Base, a military facility recently renovated by the Chinese. Western countries, particularly the United States, have expressed concern that the base is to be China’s outpost in the Gulf of Thailand to bolster their power and presence in the South China Sea. China denies any special role for China but the renovations created berths that accommodate aircraft carriers–and Cambodia doesn’t have an aircraft carrier.

Cambodian social media is also up in arms because the government is filling in the bay for development purposes and has despoiled the mountain hilltops on both sides of the bay, destroying the forest cover to get stone for the renovation.
Farther along the highway is this famous tree which has been left in the middle of a rebuilt highway. It is on a hilltop overlooking the sea and is known in popular lore as the place where wives and lovers waited for their seamen to return.

Human Rights Celebration

This is the 75th year since the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights was promulgated and this evening the local Office of the High Commission on Human Rights had a reception at a big hotel. Our Deaf Development Programme works a lot with OHCHR (I have a meeting with them at 9:00 tomorrow morning) and I was invited.

It was quite a production and a nice meal at the end. It was good to note some of the achievements in the last 75 years but disheartening to see how little we have progressed. There’s still much to do. [The sign language interpreter on the right of the stage is one of my staff.]