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…
Category: Daily life in Cambodia
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…
Visal Wedding – Rice Porridge
Guests to the morning ceremonies at a Cambodian wedding are often fed a hearty breakfast of rice porridge. This traditional breakfast food is inexpensive and simple to make, just cook rice longer than normal in four times as much liquid as normal. Rice & Pork and Kuy Teav are more common breakfasts for sale, while…
First Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is not a holiday in Cambodia. We decided to wait and celebrate on Sunday so that the SALT participant in the province, Anneliese, could join. Despite spending most of Saturday at Visal’s Wedding Crystal still pulled together an authentic tasting Thanksgiving meal. We ended up with a full house – 16 people – for…
Visal Wedding – Introduction
Our newest work colleague, Pou Sokvisal, got married on Saturday. He has been with MCC since early October as our new Planning, Monitoring, and Evaluation Coordinator. Instead of writing one long post about his wedding I’m going to break it up into a series of smaller posts each focused on an aspect of the ceremonies….