Charlie Dittmeier's Home Page
Every year at the Maryknoll office we put up a large Christmas tree that was given us several years back by a departing family. In the recent past, Fr. Bob Wynne did most of the work setting in up in his free time, but this year, after his return to the US, the tree decorating became a Maryknoll community event. We ended our usual Wednesday meeting an hour early and encouraged by some cheese and crackers and chocolate candy, the tree was set up and grandly decorated.
I took 400 new English Missals to World Vision on Saturday night for that community and we rather quickly got them put into the plastic covers with the music books.
Sunday morning I took 300 English Missals to St. Joseph Church and our crew of helpers joined right in to put the missals together with the songbooks in the old plastic covers. Here they are at work.
December 10th this year was the 70th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration on Human Rights. It’s a public holiday in Cambodia but that just means that the government schools and government offices and the banks are closed. Everything else is open.
This is the headline on the Phnom Penh Post on Monday, December 10. No one in the government of Cambodia would see the irony of the government forbidding–on Human Rights Day–a march celebrating human rights. It would disrupt traffic, said the government flunky with a straight face.
To make matters worse, today, the day after Human Rights Day, the newspaper announces that Cambodians enjoy “full freedoms”—except the right to peaceful assembly, that is.
“It’s kinda like one of those fully-flat First Class seats on Singapore Airlines….”
A group of parents in the English-speaking Catholic community have formed a Fun Play Group to allow their children to meet and be friends with other children in a fun atmosphere with a little prayer and reflection to help the children grow in a positive setting.
The group met Saturday night after the evening mass and a good time was had by all!
Because we have a multi-cultural congregation in the English-speaking Catholic community, we provide a paper missal that allows people to read the scripture readings when they are being proclaimed by the lector at mass. For 95+% of our congregation, English is their second, third, or fourth language so sometimes they don’t catch the full meaning of only the spoken word.
The new English Missals for the church’s new liturgical year got lost this year. They were shipped from Ho Chi Minh City on 14 November but we didn’t pick them up here until last Wednesday. Then today I took 400 of them in a tuk-tuk to World Vision where we have our Saturday night mass in their auditorium.
Today Jonathan Hooker (black shirt), a really fine advisor to the deaf program at Krousar Thmey, came to say goodbye to us at DDP as he finishes his volunteer term. Jonathan has been instrumental in linking Krousar Thmey and the Deaf Development Programme and in arranging financing and keeping our sign language committee functioning. His replacement will be Juliet who came with him today. On the right is Keat Sokly, the co-director of DDP.
Today was Cambodia’s official celebration of the International Day for People with Disabilities. The UN-designated day was 3 December but the government here transferred the celebration to today. The annual event is rather a charade. No person with a disability spoke or had any role in the planning or enacting of the celebration. No person with a disability was even on the stage except for Mr. Veasna, in a wheelchair, who is head of the National Center for People with Disabilities. We were required to be in the hall 1.5 to 2 hours before the starting point, the deputy prime minister spoke for 1.5 hours, they gave $1.25 to each person with a disability, and that was it.
Musica Felice (Happy Music) is a choral group organized and directed by Ms. Miwako Fujiwara, a professional keyboard player and music teacher. Many members of the choirs at our two English churches are musicians and singers with Miwako. Last Sunday they presented a first-ever outdoor concert at a five-star hotel, along with the 9th Harmonics, a male filipino choral group, and a jazz group.
Friday morning I was at the conference and then in the afternoon I went back to Manila and then caught a 6:00 AM plane back to Phnom Penh. Click here for some photos from the day.