Category: Deaf

People and activities in the Cambodian deaf world

Trip to Australia: Friday

Charlie is on a trip to Australia to work with Caritas Australia, a DDP donor.  The trip started off OK; the reporting about it in these pages has been a disaster.  The center where I am staying has terrible wi-fi connections and finally Saturday night I had to just give up and go to bed after I could not upload these pages with 1.5 hours of trying.  Click here to finally see what the first day of the trip was like.

Getting Ready for a Trip

These are some of young deaf men participating in our DDP job training to become barbers.  This morning I dropped in for a quick trim of my beard as I prepare to head to Australia to speak to donors about Caritas Australia who gives money to the Deaf Development Programme.  That’s the name on the shirts of the guys on the left and on the right.  I leave in about an hour and will return to Phnom Penh on 2 March.

Another Year Older

The birthday girls and boys

Each month we have a birthday celebration for the staff of DDP born in that month.  Yesterday we had a celebration for January and February.  For some reason we couldn’t hold the usual celebration in January so we combined it with the February event.

Christmas Season 2017 #6

Charlie and the landlady with her DDP khrama

We don’t celebrate Christmas at the Deaf Development Programme because this Buddhist country makes no connection between Christmas and the birth of Jesus and we don’t want to introduce the commercialization of Christmas and Santa Claus into the culture.  But today we had an unplanned Christmas party thanks to the generosity of the landlady of our DDP office building.  Click here to see what happened.

Social Security in Cambodia

Several years ago, Cambodia started to develop a social security system for the welfare and protection of its citizens.  It was implemented just three or four years ago with the introduction of a scheme to care for workers injured on the job, what would be called workmen’s compensation in the United States.  This year a second phase is being rolled out, a healthcare plan; and a third phase, old age pensions will be introduced a few years from now.

Because the plan is relatively new and not well understood, an official from the National Social Security Fund came to Maryknoll today to speak to representatives of the Khmer employees of Maryknoll’s six projects.

The ministry actually called this meeting–a relatively rare instance of the government being proactive–but they were late for their own meeting so the Maryknoll staff from different projects used the time to get to know each other better and discuss some common issues.
When the ministry official did come, he spent 2+ hours explaining the program and answering questions from the staff who must now go back to their projects and repeat the explanation to the staff under them.