Category: On the Road…

USA Trip 2022

Monday, 3 October 2022

Today Sr. Arlene Trant, MM, took me to downtown LA where we visited Homeboy Industries, the famous project started by Jesuit Fr. Greg Boyles to give gang members a new chance at life. It is quite an inspiring place.

Homeboy Industries is located in Chinatown in LA.
A former gang member (center) took a group of five of us on a tour of Homeboys and told us of his personal experience of making the transition to a non-gang way of life.
We met with several former gang members and their descriptions of the spirit and the philosophy of Homeboys was really inspiring. It depends a lot on kinship, finding new relationships that support a different way of life.

USA Trip 2020

Sunday, 2 October 2022

On my way back to Cambodia, I have stopped at the Maryknoll Sisters retirement home in Monrovia, California. Sr. Arlene Trant and I worked together with the deaf people of Macau and now she is administrator of this home. She has been inviting me to visit so I made this my first stop on the return journey.

The center is set in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains on the eastern edge of Los Angeles, 45 miles from the sea.
Originally this was a TB hospital but the Maryknoll Sisters purchased it in 1920.
This is a view of the front of the facility from the side of the property. All the sidewalks are accessible for sisters using walkers.
This is a view of the other side of the main building. I stayed in an apartment on the basement level. My windows are by the second chair in the photo.
Most of the buildings are connected by sheltered sidewalks, more to protect walkers from the sun than from the rain. The eastern side of LA, here at the base of the mountains, is considerably warmer than LA along the coast.

USA Trip 2022

Thursday, 29 September 2022

I went to a local supermarket this afternoon, partly to buy some Coke and partly just to explore the neighborhood. It was interesting just being in a big supermarket after three years away.

My Asian friends would cringe at this sight–instant rice. That’s NOT the way to make rice!
Of interest to me were the Twinkies. I haven’t seen those in many, many years. I actually thought they had stopped making them.

USA Trip 2022

The past two days have been really hectic. I’m sorry I didn’t get to post anything here.

Today I traveled from Louisville to Monrovia, California via Denver to stay at the Maryknoll Sisters retirement home for a few days.

There’s a whole lot of desert between Denver and Los Angeles!

USA Trip 2022

Sunday, 25 September 2022

St. James baptismal font


In the morning John and Moya and I went to St. James Church for mass. One of the priests on the altar recognized me and welcomed me at the announcement time at the end. The two people who heard my name came up after mass and introduced themselves. One of them I took to Mammoth Cave with our St. Lawrence youth group back in the 70s and the other had two sisters I taught at Angela Merici High School.


After lunch my sister Mary tooks us to Parklands, a 4,000 acre park complex where she worked before retirement. It is a 100-year concept: in 100 years Louisville will have grown out to the park now beyond the suburbs and it will be a park within the city. It is beautiful with a silo lookout tower, miles and miles of heavily wooded trails, a stream for kayaking, and many places for people to be immersed in nature.

In the evening cousins who had met the night before at a center were invited to gather at the house of Julie and Eric for another family event. Their house just that day had been part of a ten-house tour of significant houses. Eric is an architect and designed their home. It is a wonderful place to live.

USA Trip 2022

Saturday, 24 September 2022

This morning I went over to my sister’s house where my brother Dennis and my sister Martha are staying. Some roofers were at work, correcting an error they had made.
My sister Mary, brother Dennis, and me.
At lunch time I met with a group of guys who went to St. Thomas Seminary together. It was great to see them again, some of them after ten or fifteen years.

In the afternoon I met with John and Joan, a delightful couple who are donating money to the Maryknoll Deaf Development Programme after recent budget cuts. They have had mission experience themselves so they could really understand when we talked about the problems of DDP.

Then in the evening the Dittmeier cousins met for an informal dinner. There are a lot of us and we really enjoy each other and it was a most pleasant evening.

USA Trip 2022

Friday, 23 September 2022

Today was a full day–not planned that way but turning out that way. I am staying with my cousins Julie and Eric, and first thing this morning Eric and I rode ebikes over to the local Kroger store to pick up a few items. We rode through beautiful neighborhoods in the Highlands.
Later in the morning, to demonstrate the ebikes to me even more, Eric led me on a longer ride to downtown Louisville and across the old Big Four Bridge, now a pedestrian only bridge, to Jeffersonville, Indiana.
Our destination was the Schimff’s candy store, described as the oldest family-owned candy store in the United States. They had an amazing array of chocolates and other candies, and then they also had this candy-making museum (photo above) displaying old candies and packaging and candy-making machines.
Later in the day Moya and John Dittmeier (seated next to Eric) flew in from Maryland and had supper with us and with Julie and Eric’s daughter Elsa and son-in-law Will and their daughter Poppy.

A great day!

USA Trip 2022

Thursday, 22 September 2022

The past two nights I stayed with my sister Martha and her family a little north of Cincinnati. They recently moved into a condominium there as they down-sized from their previous house when three of the children married.
Their new house is right on the edge of a large golf course, in a beautiful setting.
Grandpa Mark works on a puzzle with his granddaughter who is visiting.
Driving back to Louisville from Cincinnati, I went through Pewee Valley and took the opportunity to pass by our old house which was enlarged after we sold it when our mother died.

USA Trip 2022

Wednesday, 21 September 2022

The first thing this morning was cleaning the car I borrowed from my cousins for the trip to Cincinnati. Martha did a wonderful job of vacuuming it. Then she took me shopping at Walmart where I picked up a few things and then to Goodwill where I got some clothes.

In the early afternoon I did some work on the computer and then late in the afternoon I went to a sports complex and was introduced to pickle ball. My sister and her husband are taking a beginner’s course and it was a great chance for me to observe a game I had only read about.
After pickle ball, we had a dinner with Samuel, another son of Mark and Martha, and his wife Sierra. It was the first time I had met Sierra. (R to L: Martha, William, Mark, Sierra, Samuel).