ANM Day 3 (February 19)

The morning session was a meeting between Katarina from FAD and all the deaf participants in the Deaf Leadership Training Program, without any management present.
The meeting is complex because we are using English, Khmer, Cambodian Sign Language, and Australian Sign Language. Here Rebecca (L, the Auslan interpreter), shows her sign language name to Srey Mom (the CSL interpreter), and Anh (the Khmer-English voice interpreter).
DLTP and DDP staff setting up the projector before the meeting began.
Soknym, the DDP director, reported on the progress negotiating an agreement with the U.N. Development Program.
Later, Colin spoke about the action plan for DLTP for 2025.

ANM Day 2 (February 18)

ANM stands for Annual Negotiations Meeting.

The Finnish Association of the Deaf funds our project to establish a national association of the deaf and also some community development activities. Here Sophary (standing, left) informs the group about the activities since last year in the Phnom Penh area.

At the break, Julie Lawler (L), a Maryknoll Lay Missioner working in the Education Project, speaks with Katarina. Her suitcase had still not arrived!

Next on the program was a report on community development in the Kampong Cham area, given by Solydem (L), the center manager there.

ANM Day 1 (February 17)

Every year (when there’s no Covid!), our project coordinator from the Finnish Association of the Deaf comes for a week of meetings to review the past year and plan and budget for the coming year. Today Katarina, from FAD, arrived in Phnom Penh–minus her luggage–and within two hours was leading an opening meeting with us at the DDP office.

Photos required

For practically everything in Cambodia, an ID photo is required. That’s true of ID cards, company and NGO badges, job applications, school IDs, training certificates. Everyone wants to see your face.

Recently I had to get a new passport and I decided to pay $1.25 and go to a photo shop instead of doing it myself. The U.S. Embassy now requires that passport photos be without glasses so I needed to get some made like that. There are hundreds of little photo shops all over town since everyone needs photos so it was easy to arrange. I just walk in, sit for a photo with the appropriate background, choose the final photo size, and wait ten minutes or so. Here a tech person is checking my raw photo for any problems before printing it.