An open air sewage canal empties into the Boeng Trabek lake near the MCC office in Phnom Penh. Across the waters, you can see a strange tower with a ball on top standing in the near distance. This tower is slowly being swallowed by new construction and doesn’t stand out like it once did.

This tower is one of my favorite landmark buildings in Phnom Penh, after the Independence Monument and Central Market. It’s such as an unusual structure that I sometimes jokingly refer to it as the ‘Eye of Sauron’.

I often ask new visitors and volunteers what they think this tower is? The most common guess – and in fact the only one that has ever been offered – is that this tower may be a mosque. Otherwise, newcomers have simply answered that they have no idea.

This unusual tower is not a mosque. It’s the most stylish doppler radar that I’ve ever seen. This weather radar tower is operated by the Cambodian Ministry of Water Resources and Meteorology. This government Ministry was a long time partner of MCC – in fact, my placement during my first term was with the Prey Veng Department of Irrigation which is a provincial office under this Ministry.

In the early days, this partnership included bringing Orestes Gonzalez, a Water Engineer from Cuba, during the embargo in 1986 to set up an irrigation culvert production center and train government personnel on how to operate it. The embargo made it difficult for MCC to bring personnel to Cambodia from Canada and the U.S. so MCC worked with partners in India, Cuba, and Japan.

When the tower was finished in 2011, this area of Phnom Penh was far from the center of construction and development. That’s changed dramatically since. I often wonder how all of the high-rises springing up around it are affecting the radar’s efficiency. But, in any case, it remains one of my favorite Phnom Penh landmarks even as new construction begins to literally overshadow it.