It’s the most wonderful time of the year… Ripe mangoes from the Cambodian countryside have started to show up in the market! I was fairly ambivalent to mangoes before traveling to Việt Nam in University. That’s when I discovered that the mangoes that I’d been eating in North America were poor representatives of their species….
Category: Daily life in Cambodia
Christmas Duck Disaster
We had the YAMEN participants over for Christmas day dinner. We have two volunteers from Kenya and one from Indonesia. I had planned to roast duck (my first) for dinner…but it did not go so well. As I roasted two ducks for dinner one of them began to emit a putrid stench. This became worse…
Flowers of Cambodia 2019
Following up on Flowers of Cambodia from ’06 – ’09, here’s a compilation of flowers we’ve seen since returning to Cambodia. I want to highlight a few of these. I think this may be the tallest Orchid that I’ve ever seen. It was at a restaurant in rural Prey Veng province. This was on a…
O Tannenbaum
Our Christmas ornaments arrived from Maryland just in time for the holidays. We put them up in the kitchen window as our tree had already been decorated by the MCC Christmas Party committee. Our team here have their own traditions and it will be fun to see them blend together in the coming years. It’s…
SDGs Cultural Performances
On December 12, Charlotte and I attended a Cultural Performance event on the Sustainable Development Goals. I was interested to see how they would adapt traditional performance art to this subject matter. Churning of the Ocean of Milk The first cultural performance told the Hindu myth of Samudra Manthan. In this myth, Devas and Asuras are…
Baking Christmas Cookies
There’s a well deserved (but not universally true) stereotype that Mennonites enjoy baking. So, perhaps it’s not too surprising that MCC Cambodia has for many years owned two small gas ovens. I’m not sure of their origins but I know that they are the only household ovens that I’ve seen in Cambodia. All that to…
ផ្លែខ្នុរ | Jackfruit
For the North American readers, have you ever chewed Juicy Fruit gum? Did you ever wonder what the juicy fruit was? It’s Jackfruit – which isn’t that juicy but which has a sticky resin. We have a small Jackfruit tree at the office that recently had some ripe fruits. The office day guard – who…
The Girls’ First Visit to Pea Reang
This week I went on three field visits to MCC education projects at rural Primary Schools in Prey Veng province. Crystal and the girls came along to one of the Primary Schools in Pea Reang district. I’ll be sharing more about the work MCC is doing in Prey Veng in a later post. I got some…
37th Birthday
I turned thirty seven this week. Crystal baked my traditional birthday cake – Jewish Apple Cake – to celebrate and even found a place that sells hoagies in Phnom Penh. The Jewish Apple Cake was wonderful and the staff were quite impressed by Crystal’s baking skills! During my last term it was next to impossible…
Visal Wedding – Traditional Dance
Visal’s wedding had many morning ceremonies. Charlotte’s favorite was, no surprise, the traditional dance. This style of dancing is named Apsara and dates back to the 7th century. It is a slow, intentional dance with a lot of focus on stretching and turning at certain angles. Each movement is deliberate and has a meaning, but…