November 18, 19, 20 were the annual Water Festival holidays. This year, though, because of Covid-19, the boat races on the Tonle Sap River were canceled so the migration of two or three million people to Phnom Penh didn’t happen.
There are always aspects of Cambodia culture that we foreigners will never understand or fully appreciate. For me one of those is the association of the flower decorations pictured in the photographs with the Water Festival. They are of a Khmer style but their meaning, the origin of the design, how they are used is a mystery to me
These specialized designs were widely available in the markets and from street vendors.
And people bought them, maybe adding a bit of holiday cheer to a major Cambodian festival that suffered in its celebration in a pandemic year.
Cambodia has a lot of major problems: corruption, impunity, deforestation, trafficking, drugs, poor education, poverty, etc. And then there are the nuisances. When we moved our Maryknoll office to this building, we asked the landlord to put in a real sink in the kitchen. He did but the bottom of the sink is at knee level. It’s perfect for the Cambodian woman who cooks a few meals a week, though.
There were a lot of interesting things to see in Mondulkiri. I was surprised at the different types of vegetation. Click here to view some of the things we saw.
One of the greatest benefits of a large staff meeting is just the presence and interaction of all the staff with each other, meeting each other and working together in ways different from the office routines. Click here to see some of the ways the staff was together.
The afternoon of our final full day in Mondulkiri was spent exploring some beautiful natural settings there in the hills of Cambodia. Click here to see the places we visited.
The main purpose of the staff gathering in Mondulkiri was for staff training and review of our policy. Click here to see photos of these work sessions.
Angkor Forest was the name of the meeting center where we had our staff gathering. It is built around the top of what is a mountain in Cambodia. Click here to see pictures of the grounds and buildings. Really nice.
Every year at DDP we have a large staff meeting and retreat near the end of the year. We use it for training and updating and for bringing the staff together from different provinces. Click here to see Day 1 of the trip.
I am sorry for the absence of any posts for the last four days. That wasn’t the plan as we headed north to the province of Mondulkiri for an annual meeting of all the DDP staff from Phnom Penh and Kampong Cham.
Here we are at 6:00 AM on Monday morning, loading the larger of two buses that were to take us to Mondulkiri.
The overall experience was quite good for the 35 staff who attended. It was a long drive each way but we stopped (too) many times so people had a chance to get out of the buses. And Angkor Forest, the resort/meeting center where we were based was quite nice and the staff were cooperative although the options and services were limited.
But then we had our difficulties, too:
We were so far out of town that even the telephone signals were erratic and hopes of using a data connection for the Internet were dashed.
For me the troubles got worse as I tried to switch a SIM card in my phone from the company that works well in Phnom Penh to one that is better in Mondulkiri, and in the process my old SIM fell through a crack in the wooden flooring and was unrecoverable. (I just got that connection restored today.)
Then on the trip home, the smaller of the two buses had a clutch problem. The larger bus towed it for an hour or so until a place was found that works on heavy machinery and the small bus was left for repairs. All 35 of us squeezed into the one bus with all our stuff. We were supposed to arrive in Phnom Penh at 4:30 PM but didn’t get there until 9:30 PM.
And just as we arrived, we were notified that one of the staff who had been dropped off in one province on the way was tested positive for Covid-19. That meant that all of us were at risk and was especially worrisome because the students for next year were to arrive the next day in Phnom Penh.
All in all it was a good trip and I will be showing various aspects here in the next few days.
