Welcome to Cambodia, and….. – Page 143 – Charlie Dittmeier's Home Page

Reunion dinner

Today is New Year’s Eve in the lunar calendar and for the people in the chopsticks countries, the reunion dinner this evening is one of the most important happenings of the year. In non-pandemic times, everyone MUST return home for the meal together.

This is a Khmer-Chinese family next door to the DDP office compound. They are well-to-do by Cambodian standards. As I was going home this afternoon, they were arranging parts of their dinner (the roast pig) and offerings to their ancestors (the paper houses and car and the beer and soft drinks and fruit and incense). And they were well decked out in their traditional red outfits for this glorious night!

Religious Symbols

Some people have their bathtub madonnas, others….

“Hey, I’m getting by….”

It must be a headache having a 9′ by 9′ room as your motorcycle repair shop, but imagine also the hassle of just getting a moto up into the shop without a ramp. Talk about doing the heavy lifting!

Got you covered….

Whether it’s for the inside (of you) or the outside, this shop has you covered.

Getting serious about the Lunar New Year

You know the lunar new year is getting close when people start to put out their chrysanthemums. You can’t do that too early because they will bloom and fade before the holiday. Click here to see some of the early arrivals.

Close to dinner time

This woman is preparing for the supper time crowd, readying street food. The big pots are vegetables and meat to go with rice and then there are all sorts of grilled meat and fish.

Heading home….

The newspapers are reporting large numbers of migrant workers (Cambodians, working legally or illegally in Thailand) who are now daily streaming across the Thai-Cambodian border, legally or illegally. They earn about $10 or $11 a day in Thailand (which gives you a clue how low their pay would be if they were in Cambodia because they’re going to Thailand to get more money than here) but now there is a spike in coronavirus infections in Thailand and the workers are afraid for their personal safety and also many of the businesses that employed them have closed so there are no jobs.

This presents quite a problem for Cambodia because more than 80 of the returnees have tested positive. That’s one sixth of all the cases in the kingdom. And those are the ones who crossed at the legal checkpoints and were tested. Others sneak in through the jungle because they don’t want to be quarantined. It could be a perfect setup for a major infection in Cambodia.

Eat Here

Yesterday you saw the cooks preparing food for dinner at the hostel of the Deaf Development Programme. This is the eating area, outside the kitchen, where the deaf youth gather for their meals.

Supper Time

Here is the cooking crew for tonight’s supper at the Deaf Development Programme hostel in Phnom Penh.

Sad day….

This is my 1984 IBM clicker keyboard that has been going strong for 35 years. But today it suddenly stopped lighting up! O sorrow! This is one of the real things, not one of the six-ounce plastic jobbies that come with desktops today. It weighs about six pounds and in its day, this clicker was worth $600. I’m hoping I can find some repair geek around here to take a look at it. I’m suspecting the problem is in the cable.