Charlie Dittmeier's Home Page
Today Benjamin Jerome, Sheila, and their son Isaiah left Phnom Penh for a new job and a new home in Laos. They have been a very active part of our English Catholic Community for the past nine years helping with coffee and doughnuts, serving as lector, communion minister, and altar server, and just contributing to the life of our group in so many ways. We will miss them. May God truly bless them in this new stage of their lives.
Fr. Miguel, the retreat master, and Bishop Kike working on a computer glitch.
Today about 60 priests from Cambodia gathered at the Catholic center in Sihanoukville on the coast for a week of retreat.
Today King Sihomani attended the annual royal plowing ceremony in Kampong Speu Province. The ceremony, held at the beginning of the rainy season, is to predict the fortunes of various agricultural crops in Cambodia.
First two oxen make three plowing trips across the designated field, attended by royal officials.
Then the oxen were led to seven platters with various foods, to see which they would choose. Today the oxen favored rice, corn, and soybeans indicating to the officials that those crops will be bountiful this year. The other offerings placed before the oxen were sesame, grass, water, and wine.
[Now you know! If you want to invest in Cambodian soybean futures, now is the time!]
[Photos are from the Khmer Times.]
Johnny Ng (R) is a deaf man from Singapore whom I have know for 30+ years. He met Sophors (L) and his wife Sreytin at a Catholic deaf meeting in Indonesia last year and they arranged for Johnny to visit Phnom Penh. Tonight after our mass, we went to dinner at a Chinese restaurant.
When I first started flying to Bangkok in 1980s, the old Don Muang airport was a bit dowdy but served well. Then the new Suvarnabhumi Airport was build, relegating Don Muang to a domestic and no-frills airport.
Coming back from Bangkok last, there is now a no-frills S terminal at Suvarnabhumi and it is top-notch. It’s got all the shops and glitz and gardens. Just no people. It just opened and the carriers haven’t moved all their flights there.
It’s nice but it took almost twenty minutes to get there, even with a train ride, from the main Suvarnabhumi terminal.
I don’t like to cook–and don’t even have a stove in my house, just a microwave. Cambodia has many of these food stalls–simple shops set up on the street where a woman or a family cooks 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 or more big pots of what the Cambodians call “food,” i.e., something to be eaten with rice which in Cambodian culture is NOT food.
Once every week or so, I go to a food stall near my house and lift the lids of the six pots there to see what has been prepared. I look for things I might like and also look for the chopped red chilies in a pot. Those pots I REALLY avoid.
I tell the cook I want enough food for four people and give her a plastic box to put it in and then I ask for enough rice for four people and give another plastic box for that. Then I go home and each night of the week I eat the same thing fired up in the microwave. Supper for five nights costs me $6.25.
Sami Scott is a Maryknoll Lay Missioner who formerly worked in Venezuela and Cambodia and is now assigned to Haiti. Because of the unrest and violence there, she has had to leave Haiti and is now on a visit to Cambodia.
Then our group, coming from eight different countries, had a pizza dinner.