Bi Salon at Work!

DDP has a Job Training Project and one of our placements for training of young deaf women is at Bi Salon, where ten of our students are trained in various parts of the operations of a beauty salon. Ms. Kem Khemara, a local businesswoman who spent seven years in Japan, owns the salon and has been the driving force in welcoming and training our students who have done very well under her tutelage.

Last week Khemara surprised us by bringing her stylists to DDP and cutting our students’ and staff’s hair in an impromptu salon on our new front porch. It was a wonderful experience, especially for many of the deaf young women who seldom if ever have their hair cut like that, and we sincerely thank Khemara and her staff for their generosity with their time and their talents!

Kem Khemara (L) cutting a student’s hair in an impromptu beauty session at DDP.
DDP students waiting their turn for a haircut.
Khemara and her stylists with DDP staff and students after an afternoon of cutting.

Notable Quotes

A quote from two conservatives, Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution and Peter Wehner of the right-leaning Ethics and Public Policy Center, from an article they wrote for the New York Times:

The most troubling — and from our point of view the most disappointing — development of the Trump era is not the president’s own election and subsequent behavior; it is the institutional corruption, weakness and self-betrayal of the Republican Party. The party has abandoned its core commitments to constitutional norms, to conservative principles and even to basic decency. It has allowed itself to be hijacked by a reality television star who is a pathological liar, emotionally unsteady and accountable only to himself. And it has embraced presidential conduct that, if engaged in by a Democrat, it would have been denounced as corrupt, incompetent and even treasonous.

Unwanted Surprise

We moved our office to a new site last week (I’ll be starting a series of photos about that tomorrow) and today we got a surprise at the new site when the main waterline from the street broke. It took us a long time to find and dig up the cutoff valve and then it wouldn’t work so we plugged the incoming pipe with a cap held on by a brick and the concrete buttress until Sokly our director could run out and get a piece of replacement pipe and get it connected. Well done, Sokly!