This evening there was a birthday celebration for one of our long-term volunteers at a Shanghai buffet restaurant in Cheung Sha Wan. About 12 of the deaf group gathered for a very pleasant evening.
| The MMAF (Maryknoll Mission Association of the Faithful) will hold its third assembly in May, 2000 to look at the overall health and direction of the Association after its first six years. I am attending as one of the delegates from Asia. During the trip I will also speak to various groups and parishes. I will return to Phnom Penh in late June. |
This evening there was a birthday celebration for one of our long-term volunteers at a Shanghai buffet restaurant in Cheung Sha Wan. About 12 of the deaf group gathered for a very pleasant evening.
Today is Derby Day and life in Louisville is much different from normal. During this past week, everything that moves--humans, steam boats, hot air balloons, tricycles, waiters with trays of glasses, white rats, etc.--has been raced, and today was the big horse race. Pewee Valley is far enough out of town not to be affected by the crush of traffic and crowds, but last night when I landed our pilot had to taxi a very different route to go around the hundreds of private aircraft flown in for the Derby today. It was interesting to see a Japanese owner win the Derby with a horse named Fusaichi Pegasus. The Derby is described in the US as "the greatest two minutes in sports." Three of my sisters and one brother came over during the afternoon to watch the Derby and eat with us and to say hello, and I was trying to explain to them that in Hong Kong--home of some of the world's most avid horse race fans, it is the Melbourne (Australia) Derby and the Royal Ascot race in England that capture most of the attention.
One of the reasons for making Louisville the first stop on my itinerary was the first communion celebration of my niece Olivia in Cincinnati. Three carloads of Dittmeiers left Pewee Valley at 11:30 AM for the 2:00 PM ceremony, but we were all late. There was tremendous post-Derby traffic heading north and when I-71 was reduced to one lane for construction, we lost about 45 minutes in the slowdown. We probably would have made it to the church on time but after we crossed the Ohio River bridge we made a wrong turn, and we didn't get to St. Theresa Church until 2:10. I was supposed to concelebrate but ended up in the choir loft with the other latecomers. Still it was a very good ceremony and all went well.
After the mass I introduced myself to the pastor of St. Theresa, Fr. Larry Tharp who is the only priest at the 2000-family church. He mentioned that he had had 16 weddings, funerals, baptisms, and masses in the past two days! That is the kind of schedule that literally kills some priests and burns out the others. The church needs to address the shortage of priests in some way other than just merging or clustering more parishes.
This morning I went back to St. Xavier High School to speak to two classes of juniors, starting at 9:00 AM. Both were studying social justice issues and are scheduled to see "The Killing Fields" movie at the end of the week so the teacher, Todd Watson, was really pleased with the timeliness of my visit. Both classes went very well--and when I was leaving at the end of the morning, the assistant principal offered me a job for next year in St. X's theology department! I don't think Archbishop Kelly would appreciate my coming back to work full-time in a school when priests are so badly needed in parishes.
After the classes I went to a school supply company looking for a map of Asia to use at the assembly in New York next week. They didn't have any! I couldn't believe they had only Kentucky, United States, and world maps with none of Africa, Asia, or Latin America, but I guess that correctly expresses Americans' interest in the rest of the world.
This morning my mother invited me over to St. Aloysius Church in Pewee Valley to visit with her friends in the rosary-making group. That is getting to be a regular event each time I come home. This group of mainly retired ladies has been making rosaries together for ten years, producing more than 270,000 of them in that time.
Then I picked up my mother and some others and we met more of the family at Buca di Jeppo restaurant on the outskirts of Louisville. All my Louisville-area brothers and sisters were there along with a few other local relatives and some friends. We were in the Pope Room which has a bust of John Paul II in the middle of the large round table. We have a very enjoyable evening together.
This evening our first semi-official act was to have an informal dinner together. It was pretty low-key with Chinese food that was brought in, but it gave us a chance to sit down with each other and begin to talk to each other and establish the relationships needed for the assembly. Pictured here are Billy from Thailand, Heidi from Brazil, Vicki from New York, and Kevin from Mexico.
This evening the four of us from Asia had a meeting to plan next Wednesday's activities and content. That is the day that Asia is reponsible first for morning prayer, and then for the presentation of the reality of Asia and Maryknoll's work there. We have a ton of ideas and we brought an incredible amount of artifacts from Asia to give some substance to our verbal presentations.
After the last morning mass, Pierre had another marriage and then baptisms so I waited till he finished, and then we took a drive around the Keene area. I wish Cambodia looked like this, with all the trees and hills and bodies of water! And some of the houses are 200 years old, really beautiful old wooden structures. We stopped at the Cathedral of the Pines, a memorial to soldiers set on a mountain top overlooking a beautiful wooded valley. It was founded by the family of an Air Force man who was shot down and killed on the day I was born. Now many different religious groups used the memorial and connected lodge for various types of services. Here Pierre is standing beside one of the banners inside the memorial.
At 9:30 AM, we went to St. Joseph's Cemetery, which is owned by the parish, for a Memorial Day mass attended by about 80-90 people. It turned out to be a beautiful spring day, with enough wind to keep away the mayflies which everyone tells me are a real pest this time of year.
After lunch I went to CompUSA to see about getting a read-and-write CD drive. I've got so many digital pictures now that I need to get them off my hard drive. Burning them on a CD will be a good way to save them permanently. It was interesting to be in a US computer store. There sure are a lot of peripherals and extras that can be bought for computers these days!
This afternoon I had lunch with Norma Lewis, the doyen of the Kentucky interpreters for the deaf. I met with her to discuss ideas for a course on deaf culture for the teachers at a new deaf school soon to be opened in Cambodia where I have been asked to do some teacher training.
This morning I talked to the St. Aloysius Altar Society. I had spoken to them in 1997, right before the handover of Hong Kong to China, and they were interested in hearing of developments in China and Cambodia since then. They were a good group with a lot of good questions and observations.
After that I hurried to Pewee Valley for the birthday party of my sister Ann who turned 50 last week. We used the school cafeteria and had a really good time, especially because my sister in Ohio and her family came and my brother in Wisconsin and his family were there, too. Only one of the eight brothers and sisters was missing. I got to meet a young woman who is currently studying a sign-language interpreting program at the University of Louisville. It's just starting and is a big advancement because previously the only program was at Eastern Kentucky University which made it much less accessible to the large numbers of people living in the Louisville area and other parts of the state.
At 1215 I had mass with the Louisville Catholic deaf community. That was a really good reunion with my old friends there.
We picked up a rental car for me this morning and then headed for the Everglades where I took my first airboat ride. We had a wonderful guide, knowledgable, humorous, and with a real love of the environment. We saw some huge alligators.
This morning at 7:15 AM I headed north in the rental car for Ormond-by-the-Sea to visit my friend Dan Onley. I got there at 1:00 PM (270 miles) and we had a enjoyable visit until 4:30 PM when I got back in the car and headed back south to Cocoa Beach where my brother Dennis lives.
I had the 9:30 AM mass at St. George in Ft. Lauderdale with about 150 people. It was a really good community experience. The people are really involved in all aspects of the liturgy and participate well. I had a table set up in the rear of the church to display various objects I had brought from Hong Kong and Cambodia. After the mass I mentioned that I wanted to get rid of all the brochures that I had brought and I ended up getting rid of everything on the table, even my Khmer language textbook! That wasn't exactly what I had planned but it worked out OK. I'll get a new textbook when I get back to Phnom Penh!
I didn't get any of the work done that I had planned for this day. In the morning I walked to a nearby shopping center, near the University of Southern California campus, and looked for a few gifts for some Phnom Penh children that I need to remember.
The End