Many cities and towns have strict rules how garbage is to be set out for collection. In some places householders must use special containers or separate different kinds of trash or put the garbage in a special place for pickup. In Phnom Penh there are basically no rules and the garbage truck crews go around with pitchforks to pick up piles of trash on the street corners and throw it in the back of the truck. They are dedicated workers! Garbage crews in other parts of the world would not put up with people just throwing garbage anywhere.

In this area of Phnom Penh, this small street has no sidewalk or area to set garbage on the side of the road so all the residents hang it in plastic bags. It lacks aesthetic beauty but the garbage crews must love it because they don’t have to bend over and shovel but just pick plastic bags from the fence and throw them into the truck.

Battling the rats

There are always things to learn about a new house, and when we moved to a “new” Maryknoll office on St. 420, one of the things we learned is that it has its share of rats.

We had asked the landlord to put screens on the downstairs windows, and he did, but the second night we were there rats chewed through the plastic screening. That was in the dining room through the door in the picture on the right.

Here in the kitchen the rats found they almost had a red carpet invitation. The kitchen is basically a semi-room built onto the back of the house, probably because the builders were cooking on charcoal braziers (like most Cambodians) and the smoke would not get into the house. A solid wall extends up about five feet and above that was sheet metal and chainlink fencing–an open invitation to the rats.

We finally had enough of the intruders and installed a metal screening in the areas where the metal sheeting was penetrable. In this picture, the new screening is silver colored and above the refrigerator.

There is a door leading to the outside in the kitchen and it would stop a human being but not much else. There was just a grillwork in the door, chainlink fencing above the door, and a 3-inch gap below the door. Very convenient for rat traffic.

We put glass in the door, an extension on the bottom of the door, and more of the silver screening above the door. All of this happened just three days ago. We haven’t seen any rats in the kitchen since the modifications but we’ll have to wait and see if we are successful or not in keeping the rats out.

Not a good future for these birds…

Here is a cage with eight roosters in it. It was just on the sidewalk in front of a typical shophouse. The owner would be keeping them for cock fighting. They got into a few battles while I watched, just because there were too many of them in a cage designed for one rooster. Is it illegal? Cockfighting is, but these cages are out in the open everywhere.

Getting ready for graduation

Today at the Deaf Development Programme, deaf staff and Sign Language Project staff prepared a banner to be used for the graduation ceremony for sign language interpreters class next Friday. The banners have pictures of the present king and his father and mother and then the name and date of the event. Such banners are a mandatory part of every ceremony in Cambodia.

Changing times

Years ago this little house with a sloping roof might have been quite the thing: on a major street corner and even has concrete lower walls. Now it’s lost any allure it once had and is a sorry remnant of a former era. It’s surrounded by more modern buildings, it has a huge billboard stanchion right in front of it, and it’s rather decrepit. But it has an air conditioner!