Vietnamese New Year

Bishop Olivier



There is not much of visible Chinese Catholic community in Cambodia but there is a huge Vietnamese Catholic community. Yesterday Bishop Olivier celebrated the Sunday mass on New Year’s Day with one Vietnamese parish. Here he is on his way to mass with them.

After mass with the Vietnamese community.

CACD Retreat #2

As part of the CACD retreat (Catholic Alliance for Charity and Development), we visited a social enterprise center where Bishop Olivier has created basically cottage industries to give employment mainly to people with disabilities and poor women who have no source of income and no possibility of jobs like in the city.

One source of employment is weaving khramas (scarfs) and other cloth on these massive wooden looms.
Weaving is a simple process basically but it looks rather complicated to the untrained observer. Here a woman guides a shuttle with white thread across the loom while the shuttle with green thread rests on the finished product.
Here a woman weaves a solid-color piece of material. It is a slow process, basically weaving one thread at a time.
Another view of the process.
This woman is able to bring her toddler child to work with her.

What’s Cambodia Like #4?

I don’t intend to dwell only on the negative aspects of life and culture in Cambodia but there are so many of them. They certainly can’t be ignored in daily life.

It seems almost every day, literally, there is another story of some government official or military officer or village chief arrested for fraud, selling government land, appropriating land of indigenous peoples, cutting protected forests–you name it.

Lunar New Year’s Eve Preparation

Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve for the Lunar New Year of the Rabbit and many people in Cambodia are preparing for the celebration. The Lunar New Year is not an official holiday in Cambodia but many, many people claim some Chinese ancestry and take two or three days off to celebrate. There were signs of preparation along the streets of Phnom Penh this week.

Vendors had plenty of chrysanthemums on sale and also lots of oranges. Both are preferred because of their golden color promising wealth in the new year. And then there are the Chinese lanterns and decorations to make for a festive house.
One international school welcomed its students with many lanterns hung in the entrance-way while another chose pots of chrysanthemums to create a spirit of celebration.

What makes my day (or week)!

I’m sure all of us have certain little events or occurrences or perhaps meeting certain people that “make my day,” that is, something that gives a really pleasing and satisfying tone to the day (or maybe to a week).

For me, it is having the bananas I buy in a bunch (called a “hand” of bananas here) get eaten before the last ones are impossible to peel and so overripe they need to be eaten with a spoon. This hand of bananas has fourteen individual bananas. Normally the bunches have anywhere between twelve and twenty bananas and the fruit sellers don’t want to cut the bunch in half, which would be perfect for me.

I am the only one who eats at my house so I need to consume them all. This type of banana is smaller than a typical US banana and I try to eat one at each meal and that would work out to finish them off in about five days. But with eating breakfast in different places because of morning masses, sometime I’m slow working on the bunch and after six or seven days still have a few really brown, really soft bananas to go.

So it makes my week when the bananas are still firm and good tasting when I get to the last one of the bunch!

CACD Retreat

Today was spent–all day–at Takeo, south of Phnom Penh. I got up at 4:40 AM to catch a bus taking members of the Catholic Alliance for Charity and Development (CACD) to the St. Paul Institute in Takeo where we had an annual retreat that Bishop Olivier combined with a tour of the institute and two high schools and a social enterprise center there. It was quite a day. [More on the retreat to come.]

Cleaning Day

DDP has moved its Phnom Penh office from a larger office building to a smaller new building in the same compound, a cost-cutting move. But before leaving the old grounds, we had a general cleanup of the yard and the old building with all the staff participating.

Some broken and unusable tables and other pieces of furniture were gathered to be hauled away to a dump.
We found some old student desks behind a building at the rear of the property. Why the old desks were saved in the first place really isn’t clear but they’re gone now.
After a couple hours work, it was time for a break.
Although we had separated items to be disposed of into two piles, one pile for the landfill and the other to be recycled, plans were changed when the landlord unexpectedly showed up and asked us to throw all the landfill-destined materials into the fish pond which he wants to fill up.