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We don’t get Christmas carols on the radio starting with Halloween (we don’t get ANY Christmas carols on the radio!) but we do get some decorations around the city. Today I was at St. Joseph Church in Phnom Penh and found workmen setting up a LARGE artificial tree and a grotto/ manger on the church grounds. I’m glad they do big, bold expressions of our Christian Christmas practice but, hey, it’s not even Advent yet. Couldn’t we wait a couple weeks to set all this up?
Cambodia has its tourism industry and its garment factories but a majority of the people make their living by farming and with small businesses they set up at home or on the street. Those handling the small businesses spend a lot of time sitting and watching for customers. Click here to see some of the people waiting.
This is the last weekend of the Catholic church’s liturgical year. Next Sunday, December 3, is the first Sunday of Advent and the start of the new year. Tonight, after the Saturday evening liturgy at World Vision auditorium, we had to take the old green English Missal from the plastic covers that bind them with the music books and replace them with new, violet-colored 2018 missals. We had a magnificent response to our request for people to stay behind after mass and help us make the switch for 320+ books. Here the volunteers put the old green missals into boxes to be taken away for recycling.
All kinds of food are sold on the street in Cambodia. Some of it is seasonal, but one offering that is available almost any time is the roasted bananas. Three or four on a skewer stick, they are grilled on a cart going around the city and eaten warm, a real favorite. Here this man is also roasting some kind of round cake but I don’t know what that is. Maybe it’s some kind of mashed-banana cake?
Today was American Thanksgiving Day and we celebrated here in Cambodia also. It was a regular work day but at the end of the day we met at the Maryknoll office for a festive dinner featuring, as our Cambodian cooks say, the Big Chicken. May we all be thankful for all that we have and share it generously. Click here for photos from the evening.
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“We should cease to imagine nuclear weapons as tools for us to manage, but rather as a curse we must banish.” ~Fr. Drew Christiansen, at the November, 2017 Vatican conference on nuclear weapons |
Here is a busy street corner in Chbah Ampov, across the Vietnam Bridge, along Highway 1 (of Vietnam War fame). These women dispense bread and gossip, probably a goodly amount of both.
Several years ago, Cambodia started to develop a social security system for the welfare and protection of its citizens. It was implemented just three or four years ago with the introduction of a scheme to care for workers injured on the job, what would be called workmen’s compensation in the United States. This year a second phase is being rolled out, a healthcare plan; and a third phase, old age pensions will be introduced a few years from now.
Because the plan is relatively new and not well understood, an official from the National Social Security Fund came to Maryknoll today to speak to representatives of the Khmer employees of Maryknoll’s six projects.
Today was basically a travel day. We left the retreat center after breakfast, made a stop at the big market in Sihanoukville, and then headed north to Phnom Penh and points beyond (for the Kampong Cham team). Click here to see the pictures.