Sr. Arlene Trant Visit to Cambodia 22-30 July 2013

29 July 2013 In Kampot, the NGO called Epic Arts provides training in performing arts involving both people with disabilities and people without disabilities. They have a large modern performing arts center and they also run the Epic Arts Cafe in town. It is popular among the foreigners who come to this quiet coastal town.

Epic Arts and the Deaf Development Programme have had a close working relationship over the years and now four deaf people work at the cafe.

Arlene Trant and Charlie had no rain while in Siem Reap Province at Angkor Wat, but in Kampot there was quite a bit of rain. At the DDP office, there was some minor flooding in an outdoor area.

Most of the fifteen Kampot staff of DDP were gone today because of the travel day for those who voted yesterday. At the office with Charlie were the center manager, a field work supervisor, and the guard.

28 July 2013 Back in Phnom Penh after the Angkor Wat trip, Arlene took a motorcycle ride across town to the 10:00 AM mass with the English-speaking Catholic community. Motorcycle taxis are an everyday part of life in the cities of Cambodia.

After mass, Arlene and Charlie took a van to the southern town of Kampot. There we were met by Leakhena, the DDP Kampot center manager, and her husband and daughter. They provided us with rides over to DDP House, the hostel which DDP provides for students studying in the Education Project in Kampot.

Most of the students were away today because this was election day in Cambodia. Without absentee ballots, everyone must travel to his or her home province to vote so students left yesterday to vote today and will have a holiday tomorrow to return to Kampot.

The students and house parent were proud to show the visitors the rooms where the girls sleep in DDP House. It was pleasing to see how neat they kept the house and their rooms.

Then in the evening all the students too young to vote or who lived in Kampot Province joined with the visitors for supper in a restaurant near DDP House.

At the end of a pleasant evening, the students and visitors got together for a group photo.

26 July 2013 The Angkor Wat complex is huge. There is an outer ring of buildings with three major entranceways, and inside the main entrance is this Buddha statue. Here Phirum, our guide for the day, explains it to Arlene.

One through the outer ring of buildings, visitors pass through large open areas filled with moats and artificial lakes. From this vantage point, all five of the Angkor Wat towers can be seen.

Restoration work, funded by many different countries, goes on continually at Angkor Wat and at other temples--more than 200--in a 100-square mile area. These men are injecting an epoxy to stabilize a carved stone bas-relief more than a half-mile long.

Arlene Trant and Phirum the guide stopped to rest in one of the inner courtyards inside the main Angkor Wat central building. The Angkor Wat building is as tall as Notre Cathedral in Paris and has as much stone as the Cheops Pyramid in Egypt.

As the Angkor kingdom declined, Angkor Wat was abandoned and the jungle had more than 400 years to reclaim the land.

The huge spung trees are magnificent but present a real dilemma. If the archaeologists preserve the trees to show the power of nature, the trees will eventually destroy the temple. But then the trees will eventually die and both the temple and the tree will be gone.

25 July 2013 Arlene Trant came to see the Deaf Development Programme and the Maryknoll projects in Cambodia but she also wanted to see Angkor Wat. This morning we took the 7:30 AM Capitol Tours bus from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap where Angkor Wat is located. The trip is 190 miles but took seven hours!

After checking in at our guest house--run by a friend of another Maryknoll sister--we visited the Krousar Thmey school for the deaf in Siem Reap. We received a warm welcome from Sophal (second left), the director of the school, and were able to talk with some of the deaf teachers and students.

A one-day ticket to the Angkor Wat temple complex is $20 and a three-day ticket is $40. If you buy a ticket after 4:45 PM on one day, you can also use it the next day which is what we did. We bought a one-day ticket and then spent the next two hours at the Bayon Temple, one of the favorites with the tourists. It has 54 towers and each one has a large stone face on each of the four sides. It is quite impressive.

The Bayon Temple was established by a Buddhist king. Many of the old Buddhist statues were destroyed by war or looted, but there are still several recent shrines within the temple walls where people pray today.

On this trip we stayed at the Bun Kao Guest House recommended by Sr. Len Montiel. It was a good recommendation. Mr. Bun and his family were most welcoming and gracious.

24 July 2013 On this Wednesday, Arlene spent the morning and early afternoon in visiting various Maryknoll projects other than the Deaf Development Programme and in meetings with the Maryknoll sisters.

The Cambodia Mission Team has a meeting every Wednesday, followed by a liturgy and supper, and Arlene joined the group for the liturgy and to eat. Here she introduces herself as a first-time visitor to the liturgy and demonstrates a bit of sign language.

Arlene met many of the friends and co-workers of Maryknoll and had dinner with Lisa Chin, a student from Notre Dame University in the United States, who is here for the summer.

23 July 2013 After a morning at DDP, Arlene and Charlie ate near the Russian Market, and afterwards walked through one section of the market just to give a sense of what it is like.

The afternoon was spent back at DDP where plans were made for seeing Maryknoll projects during the rest of the week.

Near the end of the day, before the rains started, Arlene visited the two Education Project classrooms in the DDP office building and talked with students about their work.

22 July 2013 Sr. Arlene Trant (left) worked with Charlie Dittmeier in Macau for thirteen years. Charlie was based in Hong Kong and Arlene in Macau, and they collaborated on liturgies and other programs for the Catholic deaf community there. After threatening to do so for many years, today Arlene finally arrived to visit the Maryknoll Sisters in Cambodia and the Deaf Development Programme. Srs. Len Montiel and Helene O'Sullivan came to the airport to welcome her.

There are not many people who work with the Catholic deaf community so it was important to work together with the communities in Hong Kong and Macau. For many years, Charlie would have mass for the Hong Kong Catholic deaf people and then take a one-hour ferry ride to Macau to have another liturgy with the group there.

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