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Cambodia just opened its first expressway, a limited-access highway like the Interstates in the U.S. It will cut the time for the trip to Sihanoukville in half but even the highway itself is an attraction for wonder and amusement.
On the surface, this lead-in to an article in the Khmer Times seems hard to believe–that there could have been police raids on 10,000 gambling dens IN ONE MONTH! I doubt those gambling sites were all set up that month so this looks like an on-going problem. And it may well continue to be a problem if only 200 people were sent to court as a result of 10,000 raids. If there is such minimal enforcement and consequences, why stop running a gambling den?
There are four members of the Maryknoll Lay Missioners in Cambodia, and in an odd turn of events, the Asia Area Director is Steve Veryser–who lives in Kenya. Today Steve arrived in Cambodia for an official visit.
This week was the 60th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council of the Catholic Church. It’s good to remember what the Council accomplished. And the best summation comes from the late John W. O’Malley, SJ, in “What Happened at Vatican II.” In short, the church moved from “commands to invitations, from laws to ideals, from definition to mystery, from threats to persuasion, from coercion to conscience, from monologue to dialogue, from ruling to serving, from withdrawn to integrated, from vertical to horizontal, from exclusion to inclusion, from hostility to friendship, from rivalry to partnership, from suspicion to trust, from static to ongoing, from passive acceptances to active engagement, from fault-finding to appreciation, from prescriptive to principles, from behavior modification to inner appropriation.”
[From Fr. James Martin’s Twitter]
The Women’s International Group (WIG) meets every week for communication, socialization, and learning. At their meeting today, the Maryknoll Deaf Development Programme was invited to present about the work that we do. Here Maryknoll Lay Missioner Julie Lawler spoke about her personal experience as a teacher in a deaf school in the United States. The gathering was a very pleasant one.
I’m a pilot (although I haven’t flown for a while) and have always loved planes. Now I am especially enamored of the A380 double-decker aircraft. I was booked on one of those on the return trip between Los Angeles and Seoul, Korea, and I chose a seat on the upper deck.
It was really surprising to me how roomy the upper deck was, with more space than many of the single-aisle aircraft I fly. One noticeable difference is the width of the rows. On the wider lower deck, there are ten seats across. On the upper deck there are only eight.
