Charlie Dittmeier's Home Page
Today we drove to Kampot Province with our donors from Korea and when we stopped at a gas station on the way down, this elaborate offering to the spirits of the deceased was placed in front of the station. Today is the Spirit Festival in Chinese culture and the gas station owners–and many, many other people in Cambodia—took it very seriously.
This woman has everything covered: she’s arranging lotus pods which can be given at the wat on the Buddhist holiday that day (and the seeds can then be eaten); in the middle she’s selling gasoline from the blue handcrank pump; and if you want to fill yourself rather than your motorcycle tank, you can buy a pomelo fruit stacked on the right.
The alien invaders have now established a new front on the east side of town. Soon we’ll be surrounded…. (Click here to see the action on the southern front.)
In a culture where many, many people are selling food on the street, anything that makes your product stand out is an advantage. One of the newest marketing gimmicks to hit the Phnom Penh streets is this chicken carousel. Powered by an electrical cable snaking across the pavement, the machine has a rotating display and warming lamps for pre-roasted chickens and geese.
The rotating displays are an eye-catching novelty now but they must be a real headache to clean.
“I wonder if I forgot anything….”
Dr. Felix Tse is a professor and administrator of a sign language linguistics program at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She came to Phnom Penh to explain the program and invite the linguistics department of the Royal University of Phnom Penh to establish a formal cooperation in sign language research. Felix and Charlie have known each other for about twenty years. Charlie studied Cantonese language at CUHK a long time ago. Click here to see more about Felix’s time in Phnom Penh.
The Maryknoll Deaf Development Programme had a farewell today for our co-director, Keat Sokly (right), who is leaving tomorrow to study in Hong Kong for a year. He will be in a sign language linguistics program at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His learning will be great for the deaf community in the long term. In the short term, we are going to miss his presence and leadership tremendously.
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Forgiveness does not change the past but it does change the future.
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Today Keat Sokly, co-director at DDP, and I met Ms. Felix Yim Binh Sze as she arrived from Hong Kong where she is a professor in sign language linguistics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Over dinner we discussed with Felix some ideas about CUHK starting a partnership with a local university to help sign language linguistics develop in Cambodia.
This is No. 6 of the nine examples of incompetence and corruption that appeared in the headlines of The Cambodia Daily in just two days. In this article they use law (or rather, made up law) to go after political opponents.
Wednesday, 9 August 2017
Thursday, 10 August 2017
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