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It is hard to show accurately the huge holes and valleys in the road leading out to the Killing Field near Phnom Penh. When I traveled it last week with some visitors from Finland, it was so torn up in places that I decided I had to go back and take photos of it. There was literally more than three or four feet difference in the levels of the roadway at the top and bottom of the valleys. In this picture, note the different levels of the two cars. The good news to report is that when I went to photograph the road today, there were workers dumping dirt into the craters and troughs. Note the large yellow road grader in the background, ready to move after enough truckloads of dirt have been dumped.
One of the places where Khmer and Western people mix most is at work. Many of the Westerners here are advisors and consultants in various projects and with various government ministries. Today Georg, from Germany, celebrated his 40th birthday and used the occasion to bring together a group of work colleagues and local Khmer people he knows. The venue was Mith Sanlanh, a program for street kids where they run their own restaurant that has become a meeting place for Westerners, especially for occasions like birthday parties and other simple gatherings. Here Georg opens some of his birthday gifts.
12 September 2003
Flying a kite is a tricky endeavor in Phnom Penh, partly because there are so many utility wires running everywhere overhead. The children, mostly boys, are quite adept, though, at getting kites airborne in the short distances they have between sets of overhead lines. It is wonderful to see the children making do with so little compared to their peers in more developed countries. It's not that they wouldn't enjoy having better toys. It's just that they don't need them to be happy, and are quite content to find odds and ends and make what they want to play with instead of looking for money to buy something.
The Phnom Penh Water Park opened last year, a source of puzzlement to some of us who wonder how it could every make money in an economy where the admission costs a couple days of average wages. In the beginning, the admission cost was $5 per person. Now it has been reduced to $3, but still that is a lot of money in a poor country like Cambodia. My personal suspicion is that it is part of a money laundering operation. 
Every building in Cambodia has the small lizards called geckos as permanent residents. They're basically harmless except for pooping on papers you leave on your desk. Rather less seen--but often more heard (they bark like dogs, literally!)--are the bigger duk-gais, such as the one shown here who lives in my room. This is only the second time in three years that I have seen him (her?) although I've often been awakened by his "DUK-gai" calls in the middle of the night. The open wiring junction box is four inches across so this specimen up near the ceiling is about eleven or twelve inches long.
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A feature of life in Phnom Penh is the number of small sidewalk stalls selling food every morning. A large number of people eat breakfast on the streets here; and these food vendors set up on empty sidewalk about 6:30 AM, bringing in tables, small plastic stools, and all their cooked food on cyclos, the pedal-powered three-wheelers. They serve dozens of people on their way to work or school and then pack up and depart. By 9:30 or 10:00 AM, there is no sign that a sidewalk cafe was operating there. |
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11 March 2003
I thought I had seen all the permutations of barber shops in Phnom Penh, from the little shops with closed fronts to the shops open to the streets to the isolated wooden chair set up against an outside wall somewhere. But then today I ran across the motorcycle barber shop! A man with his plastic stool and bag of barber tools drove up our street, found a customer, and set up shop right in the street. He even had a large mirror mounted on the rear of the motorcycle, for checking results, but this customer didn't seem interested in checking the work in progress.
9 March 2003
It is common in Cambodia to see women putting on long gloves as they prepare to ride their motorcycles, to protect themselves from the sun. Unfortunately they are not covering up against the UV cancer-causing rays. Instead they are victim of the prejudice that white is beautiful so they don't want their skin to get any darker. Here a friend puts on shoulder-length gloves and then ventures forth fully prepared against the heat, sun, and dust of Phnom Penh.
14 February 2003 Here it is another weekend. Have you ever wondered what the ex-patriate community does on the weekend in Phnom Penh? Probably not. But I'm going to tell you anyway. Every Friday the Cambodia Daily, the only English-language newspaper in Cambodia, prints a back page listing the social, cultural, and religious events in the community. The listing reflects a wide variety of ethnic origins, cultural backgrounds, and different interests. Here is the first column of the listing for last weekend. Go to Part Two
Go to Part Three
Go to Part Four
29 January 2003
As part of the restructuring of the Deaf Development Program, we initiated job descriptions and clear and strict rules for all the staff, something which they had not had before. We spent hours and hours going through the policies and procedures, one by one. One new requirement for the staff was signing in and out when they came to work. As we were explaining that rule, we discovered that a good number of the staff (not the students pictured here) didn't know how to calculate the number of hours they worked in a day. For example, if they came in at 7:00 AM and left at 12:00 noon, they could not do the math to figure they had worked five hours. Probably they could have given the correct answer for 12-7=5, but applying that same math to time measured in hours was something they didn't know how to do. So many of the simple concepts we take for granted in more developed countries just aren't present here. Cambodia still has a l-o-n-g way to go.
9 January 2003
The people who can afford to fly on airplanes--and their friends who come to meet them--have the money, so it all makes sense. Cambodia just got its first international fast food franchise, at the Phnom Penh airport. When we went to pick up the new lay missioners last Saturday, all the Maryknoll group were surprised to see Dairy Queen, the real thing, now operating by the arrivals exit of the new terminal. Phnom Penh has had imitation fast food look-a-likes before (e.g, we have Pizza House here) but this is the first time a genuine international franchise has committed to the local market. Will they survive? Stay tuned!