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Pensive in Phnom Penh
Phnom Penh, Cambodia — A varied day. We visited the genocide museum, Tuol Sleng, in the morning, and met one of the two remaining survivors of Pol Pot’s violent regime. To understand a country that is...
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The Faces of Cambodia
Photographs by Chan Kwai Onn and Daniel Sim We played games, gave prizes and Christmas gifts and even hooked up a photo printer in the village to a dangling electrical socket to print out these...
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Jetsetting
Everyone loves a travel story. Here’s one. Late last year, a friend living in southern California bought on my behalf a pair of ballet flats in the most enviable forest green there ever was. Over an...
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Places of the Heart: A Valentine for East Timor
Part Two of my 2012 Valentine’s Day posts. Places are a lot like people. Some you’ve known since childhood, met through your parents, through school, mutual friends. These are the forever friends....
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Gotta Love Geneva
Geneva has been described as “just a place with the UN buildings”, a city with nothing interesting, where the shopping is ‘boring.’ Yet I found this impressively clean city whose trains run like...
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More Things To Do This Summer (Part 2)
Grindelwald, Canton of Berne, Switzerland, June 2012. For my readers in the Northern Hemisphere who are, I hope, living things up in the summertime. Because the top post here still remains the Top 10...
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Sea Anatomy
Exhibit 1: The cochlear in our ear and the spirals of a common sea shell. In my recent venture into the sunlit depths, I realized that a lot of coral resemble the insides of our bodies. Looking at a...
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Weekly Photo Challenge: Silhouette
Dylan, 16, stands by the rushing waters of the Aare, green with glacial silt, at the village of Goldswil, in Interlaken, Switzerland. June 2012. Be still By the rushing of the river Be still By the...
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The Adventure of My Life
On a quiet evening in February this year, I listened to two Singaporeans describe what it was like being part of a Christian network helping the people of East Timor—one of Asia’s poorest...
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A Whole New World
Farmers selling their fresh produce, warmed by the late afternoon light, along the road out of Dili, the capital, towards the district of Liquiçá (Tetun: Likisá). Liquiçá, Timor-Leste — Being in a...
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Seven Days in Timor Leste (Part 1): A Day At The Market
Organic fruits and vegetables from the mountain are brought down by the farmers on vans like this one, to sell in the villages once a week. In a Timorese village in the district of Liquiçá, you can...
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Seven Days in Timor Leste (Part 2): Time with the Students
It was just an informal visit to our missionary friends in Timor Leste, and for the eight of us women, our one project was to speak to a class of 16-year-olds about dating. So over three afternoons, we...
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Seven Days in Timor Leste (Part 3): Parting Shots
Almost paradise. Save the best for last. There’s more to Timor Leste than most of the world knows right now. It’s a third world country, remote, often overlooked because it’s at the edge of the eastern...
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Weekly Photo Challenge: Inside
Inside a quiet courtyard in the Raffles Hotel, Singapore. Every week, The Daily Post from WordPress issues writing and photography challenges. They are fun and I thought this particular theme profound....
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In the Moment
Monivong Boulevard, Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life. Omar Khayyám (1048 — 1131) Riding pillon behind Kimmy on her moto (the Khmer nickname for motorbike),...
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Diary
Inspired by English playwright Alan Bennett’s Diary in the London Review of Books (9 Jan 2014), I decided to pull actual content from my 2013 pages of a journal. 30 January. The tragedy of the two...
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Cucumber-Cool in Cambodia
Image by xiquinhosilva via Flickr Phnom Penh, Cambodia — One thing I learned in the newsroom back in the day was to establish one’s dateline (the date and location of the story, placed at the top) when...
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Summer Breeze
The clouds have fled, the sunlight is strong, so strong the face burns. But there is solace in the green shade, where the pigeons coo. In the quiet town square, where the 13th century church stands...
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Avoiding the Downbeat
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Sometimes it works out when one has lowered expectations of some upcoming event. It could be an occasion, a vacation, a visitation, an obligation. Random thoughts like these...
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Tioman Revisited (1)
Tioman island, Malaysia. This hilly island and its surrounding isles was a popular dive spot for Singaporeans some twenty, thirty years ago. Unlike other West Malaysian dive spots like Redang quite...
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