In January, we made a long weekend trip to Battambang province to celebrate Sokea’s engagement. We have been waiting to write about it until after she announced her engagement on social media (which she did earlier this month). We travelled by bus with Ringsey and Doungchann. It was a very long, very bumpy ride due…
Author: Charles
2022 Traditional Khmer Photoshoot
As has become tradition, two weekends ago we joined the ‘GSL’ team for a photoshoot in traditional Khmer clothing. GSL stands for Global Service Learning; it’s the department that our YAMEN and SALT exchange program fits under. There are a number of shops in Phnom Penh where you can inexpensively rent traditional Khmer outfits and have your…
Two stories about gunmen in today’s news
Today there are two stories about gunmen in the Phnom Penh newspapers. The local story is about a ‘Phantom Gunman’ who – twice this week – has driven through different neighborhoods at night and fired 3 to 4 shots into the air before driving off. The other story is the horrific and tragically familiar school…
Home Leave 2022
Next month we will finally be on our long delayed first home leave. We will be spending June in Pennsylvania/New Jersey, United States and July in Saskatchewan, Canada. Home leave is not purely a time of respite and reconnection, we will still have some meetings and work to do, but we are looking forward to…
100 Mangoes
The MCC Cambodia office was closed on Monday in observance of the Easter holiday. Normally we would have had Friday off but we already had Friday off for the national Khmer New Year holiday. Crystal spent her day off picking 100 mangoes from the trees around our courtyard. The ripe ones that we didn’t immediately…
Cultural differences between Cambodia and North America
In our exchange program files I came across a document on cultural differences between Cambodia and North America. It was written by a former Cambodian staff – in the Connecting Peoples Coordinator role – for a specific situation and I’ve rewritten it to remove the specifics. I wanted to share it here as a Cambodian’s…
Khmer New Year 2022
To paraphrase the artist formerly known as Prince, “So tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 2,565.” That’s right. This week is Khmer New Year, celebrating the start of the 2,566th year of the Buddhist Era. In Thailand, the official calendar is BE and you might be surprised to see your phone automatically shift from 2019…
Passover at International Christian Fellowship
As the COVID-19 situation in Cambodia has improved we’ve been able to start attending in-person church again and have started attending the English language International Christian Fellowship. Before COVID-19 broke out we were attending Khmer language churches and we plan to get back to that as well, fortunately ICF meets in the afternoons so that…
Cambodian Prime Minster condemns Russian invasion of Ukraine
Historically, Cambodia has been the victim of proxy wars between nations such as Thailand, Viet Nam, France, Japan, China, U.S.S.R., and the United States. In the 1940s, King Norodom Sihanouk negotiated a bloodless end to the Japanese occupation of Cambodia and peaceful independence from France. In the decade that followed Cambodia emerged as a bright…
Update from Myanmar: April 2022
I wanted to share an update from a check-in earlier this week with one of our partners in Myanmar. I am not including our partner’s names for safety reasons and have removed any specific details that might identify them. I’m also not including the details of their current MCC project. I might share this in…