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.