With a hot sun drying a monsoon rain last month, Catholic priest Charles Dittmeier jumped into a motorcycle-pulled “tuk-tuk” taxi and zipped through loud, diesel-choked streets — toward a cause this country has largely ignored.
Passing a sprawling market, tin-roofed food stalls and a cockfighting lot, Dittmeier entered a center behind high walls where deaf Cambodians communicate using the country’s first sign language, which Dittmeier is helping to develop and teach.
It’s been more than 12 years since the soft-spoken priest from Louisville, Ky., arrived to aid the deaf in a nation still emerging from years of war, genocide, poverty and corruption — and one that before 1997 had no sign language, no deaf schools and no deaf organizations offering services.
Today, his Maryknoll Deaf Development Program, a $500,000-a-year charity, serves as Cambodia’s only program providing adult education, job-skill training, socialization, housing and sign language development to the nation’s roughly 85,000 deaf people.
“Most deaf people here have no language beyond rudimentary gestures,” said Dittmeier. “They have no language and have never been able to communicate with another person. They’re totally isolated.”
Dittmeier, a 69-year-old Kentucky native who spent years as a priest in Louisville, today lives in an apartment in the busy capital and spends his weekdays shuttling among several deaf centers in Phnom Penh and the provinces.
On weekends, he leads a Catholic parish in a rented Phnom Penh auditorium, filled with expatriates from 42 countries working with embassies, aid groups and businesses. “I’ve got five weddings going on right now,” he said earlier this summer.
He laughs as he marvels at how his work in Cambodia has meant learning “things they never teach you in seminary,” such as facing bribe demands from a notoriously corrupt government, dealing with power outages and having to evacuate injured staffers by jet because of poor hospitals. But he has no intention of leaving.
