Charlie Dittmeier's Home Page
This morning the Phnom Penh staff of DDP got together for a little celebration of my birthday. Three of the staff put together a “cake” made of various Khmer foods arranged in a large cone. They were really good and much appreciated by all the staff!
Why should tuk-tuks have only red and yellow taillights?
Here are two photos that show the current status of the new St. Joseph Church under construction. Now the roof is complete.
You could be forgiven for not knowing there’s a van under this load of vegetables. How long do you think it took to load it? And how many rolls of tape were used?
Mangoes grow everywhere in Cambodia and everyone with land has at least one mango tree in the yard. And if you have a mango tree, you need a mango stick–a long pole with something on the end to pick mangoes off the tree. Here the DDP house mother uses a 12-foot pole to pick mangoes that are not yet ripe–but are a delicacy for Cambodians.
Here is the business end of a mango stick. This pole just has a cut off plastic water bottle on the end of the pole. It works, though. Sreymom got three mangoes while I was watching.
“If you do not find God in the stranger, in the refugee, in the poor, you will not find him in the Eucharist either”.
paraphrasing St John Chrysostom
Many oddities and quirks show up in Cambodian culture and daily life and one never knows whether it is a US-based or European-based fad or whether it some novelty originated in Cambodia. I saw this face? design? under a car door handle recently. What is it an image of? Does it mean something? Does somebody think it’s cute? Who knows?
On Sunday mornings, our English Catholic Community uses the same worship space as the Khmer community. The Khmer mass is at 8:00 AM and our mass is 10:30 AM, but the Khmer mass always go long so there is less than an hour between the masses. After their mass, a group of Khmer youth take up the mats they use for sitting on the floor and replace them with the red plastic chairs for us. After our mass, though, the youth are long gone so all of our congregation carry the chairs over to the side of the hall and stack them. Then someone comes and puts the mats back out for the 4:00 PM Khmer mass where again everyone sits on the floor. Notice that our English community have to take off their shoes because wearing shoes in a church or pagoda is a no-no for Cambodian religious people. (Have you ever gone barefoot to Sunday mass?)