Category: Mission Journal

Christmas Season 2017 #5

Every year in Advent and Lent we have a communal reconciliation service, offering the sacrament of reconciliation.   This Advent, for the first time we decided to have the service at the Maryknoll office.

Fr. Bob (at the lectern) planned this evening’s service.
These services are generally not well attended but this year we had a few more people than we did in Lent.  Using the office instead of St. Joseph Church was an attempt to make it easier for people to participate.

Christmas Season 2017 #1

Cambodia is 94% Buddhist and especially outside of the cities there is little understanding of Christianity, and Christmas—which people will have heard of–will be seen as just a western holiday where the foreigners wear Santa Claus costumes and decorate their homes with evergreen trees and lots of ornaments and lights.  Christmas is not celebrated throughout the culture at all but most western families and groups will mark the birth of Christ with church services and parties at Christian-based NGOs.  Click here to see how the English Catholic community began its Christmas season.

Flavors of Saffron

This evening we had a blessing for the new Flavors of Saffron restaurant opened by a Pakistani refugee family who just recently arrived in Cambodia after fleeing religious persecution in their home country.  I have worked with quite a few refugees in my years in Cambodia but have never seen a family work so hard and so fast to get themselves established and in control of their own lives.

What do priests do?

A not-uncommon question to priests is “What do you do all day?”  So many people see us only on Sunday when they come to mass and don’t have any idea about how we otherwise spend our time.  Well, here’s what I did yesterday:

One of our parishioners opened the first Auntie Anne’s pretzel shop in Cambodia and asked me to offering a blessing during the grand opening–which I did.  Then I got my picture taken with….is it “Mr. Pretzel”?

Changing Skyline 2

Following up on yesterday’s view of Phnom Penh’s skyline, here is a little more detail.  The red arrow on the left points out the Intercontinental Hotel that was the tallest building in Phnom Penh, at ten stories, when I arrived here in 2000.  The blue arrow on the right shows the Vattanac Capital Tower which is 39 stories tall and currently the city’s tallest although other taller buildings are under construction.

Changing Skyline

When I came to Phnom Penh in the year 2000, there was one building above five stories and it was the only building to have an elevator.  Now the Phnom Penh skyline has blossomed and 40+ floor buildings have sprung up and the prime minister has started ground work on two twin towers, the largest in Asia (the LAST thing we need in Cambodia, with all its problems!)

Difficult Cultural Differences

I just sat through a two-day review of the National Disability Strategic Plan organized by the United Nations Development Program.  I’m not sure how much good such large scale (200+ people) reviews accomplish but at least a few good ideas were aired.

Such meetings are conducted in Khmer with simultaneous translation for all the United Nations people, foreign consultants, and others who wouldn’t understand Khmer.  That’s standard procedure.  The difficulty is that it is part of Khmer culture to always use a microphone, even for a small group (ours was large) and to turn it up almost as loud as it goes.  A typical large meeting in Cambodia had a noise level that would literally be illegal in the United States unless people were wearing ear protection.  What makes it especially difficult is that we foreigners have to listen to the English translation through the headphones but the ambient noise is so loud from the PA system that it is sometimes almost impossible to understand the interpreter even when we are wearing the headphones right over our ears!  Two days of that is really frustrating.