When I move to Phnom Penh in mid-February, I will have a new e-mail address, cditt@mail.com. Actually this address is already in effect, and I suggest that you change my address in your address books immediately. The present address at IOHK will remain functional for a while, but you might as well switch to the new address now while you are thinking of it.
I think I'm in big trouble with the packing. I have been in HK for twelve years and have lived eleven years at Bishop Ford Center so things have tended to accumulate here--especially since I'm known as something of a packrat. Every night I have been going through the shopping center looking for empty boxes to put stuff in. That's a bit of a challenge because collecting boxes is a full time job for the grandmothers here (no one ever retires in Hong Kong!), and I have to be lucky to grab boxes before they get to them. Today one of the young deaf men came over and spent the afternoon helping me clear the books from my to-the-ceiling bookshelves. I sorted them on the dining room table and then he bundled them up for easy carrying later to the seminary, to the disabled center, or to the recycling bin. But there's still a LOT more to go!
Tonight we had our last RCIA class at which I will participate. Our topic was "Violence and Peace-making" and it went pretty well. We stopped fifteen minutes early and had a little party to celebrate my last night. And of course I packed up a few more lai see, the lucky money red envelopes that older people give to kids and unmarried people. I don't qualify as a kid but they think celibacy means I deserve an envelope!
One of the young deaf women came over this morning and worked for three hours boxing up all my photographs from the past twelve years. I take a lot because we need the visuals for deaf work, but I was really surprised to see that they filled FIVE boxes! It's going to be interesting getting them to Cambodia!
I had a lunch meeting with a board of directors group from a human rights agency, and then it was back to the packing. The morning volunteer came back along with another volunteer with a car and we took a BIG load of scrap paper over to a recycling bin. Fortunately it was empty when we started, but we still filled it and left four bags sitting beside it. Then we took five bundles of books over to St. Patrick's parish where one of the priests will take them to the seminary.
Tomorrow I need to get everything out of my room and line up the things that need to get to Cambodia, and then decide what goes with me and what goes later in April.
Today was another powerful day. While I was getting dressed, Dan Onley called me from the USA to wish me Godspeed, and then I headed to our centre for mass. My sign language went especially well this morning and I was pleased about that, and also about the large number of people who came. We had a visiting choir from a Quarry Bay parish (they didn't sing) and several other visitors it was good to see again. We had two young boys do a simple lion dance to lead the procession into church.
After mass we had introductions of the visitors and then we had our birthday celebration for the people born in the first three months of the year. Following that we had our annual cooking competition. It was especially good this year, with ten different entrants. I even made one of my famous peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches but unfortunately I didn't get any prize. Then there were games and another lion dance and then people just chatted for an hour or two.
I came home with four of the deaf group at 3:30 PM, and we started the final packing. Fr. McKeirnan's friends were having a baptism at our chapel and using the house for supper afterwards, so we took all my stuff out of my room and spread it out on the playground. That arrangement turned out to be a godsend because I couldn't believe how much stuff I still had to get rid of! We worked until dark separating things that were going to Cambodia, to the US, or would stay in Hong Kong, and then we separated again for things that will go with me tomorrow and those that I will take to Cambodia in April. The problem is the 44 pound limit for luggage on the airplane. We filled two boxes with 48 pounds and then I added a third box of stuff that I had forgot to put in the first two boxes, and I'll try to finesse that through tomorrow.
At 8:00 PM the original group plus two more deaf people who had come and I all went over to Lok Fu for supper. We were really hungry because I hadn't been able to offer much to them because the family had been using the kitchen and dining room. We had a full meal at an outdoor stall, and then I headed home to do the finishing up on the packing. It's almost 11:00 PM now, and I suspect I will only get two or three hours sleep, if I get any at all.
The Move and the First Week
The sendoff at the airport turned out be quite a gathering: the principal and two teachers and ten students from the Caritas Magdalene School for the deaf and twenty deaf adults were there. We had a good chance to say goodbye, take lots of pictures, and shed a few more tears before I went through immigration for the 1:00 PM flight to Phnom Penh.
In Cambodia three members of the local Maryknoll group came out to meet me at the airport and helped me drag my three boxes of stuff up to the second floor house that John Barth and I will be sharing. When I got to the airport, it turned out that I had almost 60 kgs of stuff and I got charged $142 extra for the amount over the 20 kgs allowance. A lot of the weight was in computer equipment that I brought.
I spent the first morning getting stuff unpacked and generally put away in various places in my room which is fairly small. I won't have the filing cabinets and second desk that I had in the other place, though. The house itself is a traditional wooden Khmer house with the main house on the second floor and with a beautiful porch in the front. Most of the downstairs under the house is open and the landlord parks his van there. We're in a small compound with an eight-foot wall around it--like all houses except those of the very poor who are right on the street--and we have a guard--the landlord's grandson--who sleeps outside below the house at night to watch over things.
My telephone line hadn't been installed when I arrived so I haven't been able to do any e-mail or to update the home page. One of the tasks we MMAF members want to discuss is restructuring our e-mail service here and gaining access to the internet.
Tuesday night all the new group went to the PIME house (an Italian foreign mission group like Maryknoll) for a reflection on next Sunday's gospel and a meal together. It was a delightful evening and a chance to meet some really interesting people. In addition to a Hong Kong lay missioner working with them, they have two young women, university professors, who are here teaching the faculty of the University of Cambodia courses in philosophy and sociology as the school tries to rebuild.
The second morning the four new lay missioners and I went to the Green Gate Center for an inculturation course. I am interested in any information they can offer about Cambodian history and culture, but from the first session I think it is geared mainly to helping anxious expats away from home and in a strange country for the first time. That isn't my problem! :) After the session I walked to the Lucky Market, the main store for westerners, to see about buying some bread and other things for eating at home, but when I arrived there, I realized that the store only accepts US dollars (no Cambodian riel) and I hadn't brought any.
Today was my first day in language school. My first two hours of class are at the Cambodian Catholic Cultural Center and run from 7:30 AM to 9:30 AM. A motordupe (motorcycle taxi) has been arranged to come to my house and pick me up each day to make that run. Then in the afternoon I had two more hours of class at the Khmer Language School, another institution. Apparently the five of us were too much for any one school to handle full-time so we are split between the two schools. I found it rather confusing today. And starting from scratch learning Khmer brought back vivid flashbacks of learning Cantonese in HK. Maybe I'll have nightmares tonight!
After the morning class I had the motordupe take me to the telephone company and I paid a $240 deposit and installation fee. I found out yesterday that is what was holding up the installation which is now scheduled for next Tuesday.
I borrowed an internet account from one of the lay missioners and was finally able to download a week's worth of mail. Trying to update and check my home page, I found that the internet connection here was very slow on a Friday afternoon, too slow to use. I will have to find the right times of day for connecting here.
Our second inculturation class was on security with an Australian consultant. It was interesting to hear of the different types of police here, what to expect from them, how to deal with them, etc. Cambodia had 806 murders last year and 56 kidnappings, 24 of them in Phnom Penh. Almost all were Chinese businessmen and none of the kidnappers were ever caught.
[I've been taking lots of digital photos with my new digital camera and will prepare some photo layouts here soon.]
Phnom Penh is shrinking. Today I walked to the Central or New Market, which is all the way acrossed town on the map, and it only took me 35 minutes walking relatively slowly because it's so hot. It's a big art deco style building. I passed the Russian Cultural Center, where we have mass for the English-speaking community on Saturday nights, after only 20 minutes. Phnom Penh is basically a very small town, I'm discovering. I took 42 photos with the digital camera while walking. The people here are quite agreeable about having their pictures taken, much more so than the people were in Hong Kong where I usually got a brusque wave-off when I asked if I could take someone's photo. No one has refused me here.