Maryknoll – Page 7 – Welcome to Cambodia, and…..

Tuesday, 13 September 2022

Today was my first full day at Maryknoll, New York and I started reconnecting with people here.

There weren’t many Maryknoll Lay Missioners staff in the building and I had to call Chris Keavney to come down and let me in the front door. Then he graciously reinstalled Microsoft Office on my laptop to eliminate several problems. Chris is the IT man for MKLM.

It was a dreary rainy morning but the towers and peaks of the old seminary building always have a certain attraction and cachet.

One of the changes since I was last here was the addition of a solar power unit which now covers a parking area.

This is what the underside of a solar panel set up looks like.

Monday, 12 September

This trip, first schedule for May and canceled then and again in June because of my surgery and Covid, finally started today. It began shortly after midnight when a flight on Korean Airlines departed for Seoul. Here people are checking in about 11:00 PM on Sunday night.

We had a 5.5 hour flight to Seoul and an almost two-hour layover, and there we boarded this Airbus 380 bound for New York City. Notice it is a two-deck aircraft, very new and very efficient and comfortable to fly.

This picture was taken in New York City as we landed at JFK airport. For some reason the A380 had to be towed to a parking gate, and here an onboard camera looking straight down show the ground crewman hooking up the connecting rod between the aircraft and the tug, underneath the plane. The A380 has cameras on continuously, one pointing ahead to where the aircraft is going and the other pointing downwards at what is below the plane as it flies.

Because of Covid, the buses that used to carry people between JFK airport and Grand Central Station in Manhattan have been eliminated and now people must utilize a combination of an airport train and subway trains. It is not nearly as convenient as it was before.

I had to take two different subway trains but eventually reached the always impressive main concourse of Grand Central Terminal.

At Grand Central I bought a ticket for the Metro North train that goes up to Ossining, NY where Maryknoll is located. At noon time there were few passengers and it was easier to get around with my large suitcase shown behind the man’s seat.

Today we had our usual Wednesday meeting of Maryknoll Cambodia followed by a liturgy and dinner together. The meeting was not unusual but for the mass we had five visitors–Marist Brothers in Phnom Penh for a regional meeting–in addition to our usual crowd. The usual crowd when I first arrived in Cambodia was 25-30 persons every Wednesday. “Usual” now is 7 people. It was a delight to have a bigger group gathering together tonight.

Farewell

Judy Santmire has been a regular member of the small group of people who join the Maryknoll Cambodia community for the mass and dinner each Wednesday after our Maryknoll meeting. Today was the last day Judy will be with us and so we presented her with one of our Maryknoll T-shirts we give to our special guests.

A Home-cooked Meal!

The lady who cleans the Maryknoll office and does some cooking has been in the hospital for more than a week so tonight the Maryknoll sisters had mercy on Fr. Kevin Conroy and me and invited us for dinner. It was a special treat to have a baked potato and meat loaf, good ol’ American staples I haven’t had for years. Thank you! [L-R: Kevin, Sr. Mary Little, Charlie, Sr. Regina Pellicore, Sr. Ann Sherman]

Maryknoll “Yard”

This is the Cambodian version of a triplex, three shophouse residences side-by-side in one building. The Maryknoll office, where Fr. Kevin and I also live, is the leftmost unit with the open front gate.

Standing in the open gate on the street and looking toward the house, this is our front “yard.” Again you see how a shophouse is one room wide and goes up three or four floors. The fold-up bed on the right is for our 24-hour guards who sleep next to the front doors during the night.

Standing at the front door of the house (above), this is a view toward the street. The Maryknoll sign is for when we have visitors. We don’t keep it up outside all the time because then the city says we’re a business and charges us more for everything.

On the left side of the yard, we keep our motorcycles and bicycles. And the guards make their kitchen and bedroom and work area. The situation of guards in Cambodia is a crime. At least now they have their smartphones to look at with our wi-fi but prior to the phones, they would sit and stare into space all day waiting for a door to open or something to happen.

Maryknoll Living Room

Since I’ve already showed you the kitchen and dining room of our Maryknoll office in Phnom Penh, I thought I might continue with the living room. I hope these posts give you a glimpse into the cultural differences and practices we experience here.

This view is from the rear of the living room, looking toward the street and the front of the house. Note again that this is a shophouse which by definition is one room wide and three or four stories tall. It’s considered a norm for housing in Cambodia in the cities and larger towns. This living room is the room we use for our Wednesday Maryknoll mission team meetings. We rearrange the chairs and meet and then have a liturgy together (with three or four outside guests) and then a meal together.

This is a close-up of our front door. It’s different from the front door of your house in a couple ways. First, it opens to almost the full width of the room. That is so the family business, set up on the ground floor, is open to street traffic and it also allows families with a car to park it in the living room at night. There is steel grating that can be pulled closed right outside the doors. You can see its dark vertical outline at the left of the door opening. We never use that because the area between the front door and the street is closed off by the gate visible through the door.

This view is looking from the front door toward the back of the house. The passageway on the right leads to the dining room and kitchen. The little room to the left of the corridor is the Maryknoll office where our office manager works.

This room is so noisy! The area between the front door and the street is covered with a metal roof, and in the rainy season the sound of rain is not conducive to our meetings. Also, although we are on a smallish side street, we have heavy traffic going by that is really disturbing.

This view shows the small room above the manager’s office. It’s my room. In a shophouse, it allows the family to oversee the commerce going on on the floor below. The large TV is for Fr. Kevin to watch CNN and I use it for some of the meetings or classes I have to show illustrations of various points. Notice the water dispenser on the right. Most people do not drink the water from the tap. The government says it’s safe and maybe it is when it leaves the water treatment plant, but who knows what the piping distribution system is like. There is no maintenance or updating of infrastructure here.

Maryknoll Dining Room

I figured I might as well give you the tour of the rest of our present Maryknoll office–and residence for Fr. Kevin Conroy and me. Last week I showed you the kitchen. Now here is the dining room.

This dining room used to be the kitchen and beyond the door was outside, the back of the house. That is why there is such a heavy external-type door there. Through that door is the kitchen I showed you last week (17 July). When we first moved in, we kept the windows open (behind the microwave) but immediately the rats started coming into the kitchen and into the rest of the house so now we keep those windows and the heavy door closed.

This shows the other end of that wall that used to be in the kitchen but is now the dining room. Keep in mind that this room is the whole width of the house–one room wide and four stories high. You can see a row of white tiles on the wall. That used to be a concrete counter with sink that was moved outside to what is now the kitchen beyond the door. Next to the microwave you see a black dot on the wall. That is where the old water pipe came through the wall with water for the kitchen sink. The blue rubbish bin is what I use to drown the rats and mice when I catch them on glue traps. They are alive but stuck to the trap, and I just fill the bin with water and drop trap and all into it.

This is turning toward the opposite wall of the dining room. The passageway leads to the front of the house. Notice the AC outlet high on the wall next to the passageway, with an extension cord running under the dish cabinet for the fan. AC plugs in Cambodia are generally at eye level. It may be because so much of the country floods so often.

This picture continues the turn to the right and shows the stairs leading up to the second, third, and fourth floors. Notice how steep the stairs are. That is because the house is just one-room wide and they don’t want to waste any space. Also saving space is putting the downstairs bathroom under the stairs, a common feature in houses here. A downside of that is that the bathroom ceiling has the slant of the stairs and you hit your head if you stand too close to the toilet. The filing cabinets belong to the office which is quite small.

The Maryknoll Kitchen

I have learned after 35+ years of living overseas how difficult it is to describe realities in Asia to people who literally cannot visualize things as they are here because of their experience of similar realities in their own homes or cities or lives. People need to see and experience to really understand.

Here are some photos of the Maryknoll kitchen at our present office. I’ll try to point out some of the unusual features and differences from a US kitchen.

The Maryknoll kitchen was originally an open shed behind the rear wall of the house (the wall on the right in the above photo). Preparation of food and cooking (on charcoal in clay pots) was done on the concrete and tile counter on the left. The rear door of the house (to the right of the refrigerator in the photo) is now a door from the dining room into the kitchen which has been enclosed over the years with the sheets of metal seen above the lower tile walls. Our stove works on a tank of propane gas. Most kitchens like this would still use charcoal pots for cooking.

This is a longer view of the actually narrow kitchen, to give a better perspective on its size and shape. When we moved in six months ago, we asked the landlord to put in a real sink. Previously the concrete counter extended toward the camera, where the meal sink is now, and the sink was just a square concrete hole in the counter.

This is a view from near the refrigerator, looking in the opposite direction. The blue downspouts drain rain water off the fourth-floor roof. The little retaining barrier on the floor creates an area on the floor where clothes or large pots and pans could be washed without the water running across the kitchen floor.

This photo, from a slightly different angle, shows an exterior door that leads to what used to be a narrow walkway between the house and the wall of the next door building. When we moved in, the door was just an outside door with a metal grill. When we immediately started having problems with rats, we put glass in the door behind the grill to block them. Even with a rubber strip at the bottom of the door, there is still enough room for mice to get in, however.

Category: Maryknoll

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