Category: Government and Society

Post Lockdown

Phnom Penh’s approach to vaccination is to inoculate whole neighborhoods at a time. Right now the government is focusing on Boeung Tum Pun. This is a sign announcing the injections at Wat Sansam Kosal.
Inside the wat lots of motorcycles await their newly vaccinated owners. Cambodia isn’t good at organizing events and movements of people but they have done a good job with the vaccinations.

Post Lockdown

The graph above, from VOD, indicates that all is not well with the Cambodian government’s efforts to slow down the spread of Covid-19 in the kingdom.

On the other hand, the government has made some good moves. Within ASEAN, Cambodia has vaccinated more people than any other country except Singapore. And Cambodia has from the start included us foreigners living here in their vaccination plans. In this picture a member of our English Catholic Community gets his second injection.

Post-Lockdown Day 10

The Khmer Times is a pro-government newspaper so it was rather surprising to find this editorial rather strongly criticizing the government’s handling of the restrictions caused by Covid-19. Click here to read the editorial. Notice, though, that the writer was careful to applaud the prime minister while speaking ill of his “minions.” The writer’s harsh comments are very valid.

And here is the prime minister himself saying the police have done a good job.

Post-Lockdown Day 9

Headline from Khmer Times

One of the problems with controlling the spread of Covid-19 in Cambodia is the porous nature of the borders with Vietnam on the east and Thailand on the west. A good number of Chinese make their way to Vietnam and then illegally cross the border into Cambodia while on the Thai border, there are numbers of people going both directions, some with the reported help of the Thai military.

Post-Lockdown Day 8

When several hundred protestors showed up at a Red Zone barrier, today the police let them through! Red Zones have the strictest controls over movements; people are not even allowed out of their houses. At least that is the way it was enforced before. Now people saying they needed to get to banks to collect their salaries and to get vaccinated were allowed through the barriers. Such erratic enforcement is not unusual in Cambodia.

Post-Lockdown Day 3

[Photo from VOD]

On Wednesday three weeks of lockdown ended for Phnom Penh and there was an explosion of pent-up energy and activity as people were able to get out of their houses after a long confinement. Traffic noticeably increased as pictured here on a street leading out of town.

  • The Maryknoll office guards are now in zones where they are free to come and go to work so we have guards 24 hours a day again. During the lockdown they came only at night because it was so difficult to get through the security roadblocks coming to the office.