Christmas 2018: Santa Outfits

The understanding of Christmas isn’t very deep in Cambodian society and most outward signs of the season are commercially driven and geared toward children.

Every neighborhood will have several shops selling Santa suits for primary school children.
Most schools in Cambodia are commercial, that is, they are private schools not associated with the government and also basically uncontrolled by the government.  Anyone can start a school and many people do to make money.   If you have at least one foreign teacher–or even if one of your teachers knows some English–you can call it an international school which has great cachet for the parents.  And then if you’re selling the foreign ideas, you have to celebrate things like Christmas so that creates the market for these Santa outfits.
This is where the Santa outfits end up, on the kids participating in a Christmas program and knowing next to nothing about the meaning of Christmas.

Christmas 2018: Culture vs. Christianity

In this Buddhist country, probably a good number of people would know that Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Jesus—but they wouldn’t know much about who Jesus is.  And the greatly larger portion of the population would associate Christmas with Santa Claus and Father Christmas rather than with Jesus.  Santa Clauses are everywhere.  They sell things.  Jesus is nowhere to be seen.

Some church groups get caught up in this cultural confusion.  At the Catholic school where I have mass on Fridays,  they contribute to the confusion with this nativity set to which a Christmas bear and Father Christmas have been invited.  Maybe I should be satisfied that at least the manger is still empty.

Another Configuration

When Maryknoll first moved to its office on Street 320 in Phnom Penh, down below my second-floor window was a little village of ten one-room units, two strips of five units each facing each other on one house-sized lot.  Access to this little community was through a narrow alley leading out to the street.

Shortly after we occupied the house, the owner of the little village moved everyone out, tore down the two strips of one-room apartments and put up a three-story metal shed in which he set up a metal fabrication company.  They made steel gates, doors, and railings and such–with a lot of banging and grinding.

Now that little plot of land is being subjected to more change.  The four-story building facing the street (behind which is the lot) is being extended back over the lot to make the building longer.  The sheet metal walls of the fabrication shop have been removed and it seems walls of brick and concrete are being extended from the existing house to make new walls around the lot below my window.  Here is a picture of a young man using a torch to cut away some of the scaffolding that held the metal walls before.

Good Publicity

Recently DDP was contacted by a local station’s producer who wanted to do a short segment on DDP and its work.  Today he came to interview a couple of our staff and one of the deaf students.  We hope to see the results on air in a few days!

The producer first interviewed our DDP director, Keat Sokly, and then he sat down with Korn Maly (pictured here), the manager of our Sign Language Project.
Then the producer filmed one of our deaf students answering questions about her experience at the Deaf Development Programme.

Advent…with signs of Christmas

At World Vision, we rent their hall and so have to set up for mass every week and decorate the room with banners, candles, etc.  When Fr. Bob Wynne was here, he made sure that the seasons were kept distinct and arranged all the changes in colors, banners, etc.  Now that he is gone, things sometimes go awry.

Here is a picture of our Advent Wreath as we celebrate the 3rd Sunday of Advent.  That’s great.  But on the pillar behind the wreath, is a Christmas wreath, a decoration that shouldn’t have gone up yet.  Today we were supposed to have violet banners hanging on all the pillars but….