When we went to Vietnam in October last year for a holiday just to see the country, we were told about a Redemptorist monastery in Ho Chi Min city, formerly known as Saigon.
So when we went there and met the Rector, we donated some clothes for orphans that his order looked after; and he told us about another orphanage which we tried to get in touch with but had no luck.
When we returned to Perth, an Infant Jesus parishioner told us that a couple of Sisters from that very same orphanage had visited the parish to raise money to build a new orphanage that a Religious order called Sisters of the Lovers of the Cross are building.
We tried to contact them and eventually managed to track them down on email when they had returned to Vietnam.
From then on, we were in contact and wanted to be benefactors. So, to satisfy ourselves that things were OK, because we were told a lot of stories about Vietnam, we asked if we could come and live with them, to take in the whole story – how they sleep, wake up, how they are fed – not just to say we visited and came back. We did the whole ‘investigation’ ourselves.
When we returned in August (this month), we were extremely surprised by what we saw and learned in this remote part of Vietnam.
We are supporting two other missions in India, and we found this particular mission different in the sense that the work that we are doing in India is in a democratic country.
The challenge in Vietnam is under a Communist regime often hostile to the Catholic faith. So there is total dependence on sponsors.
We had to dodge the Communist system to live with the Sisters.
According to their legislation, foreigners can’t live within religious institutions, so we had to find ways of virtually slipping away from the probing eyes of ‘the faceless men’ – what the locals call the police who are spies to the government interior ministry.
Apart from the orphanage, the Sisters look after the aborted foetuses – they go into the abortion clinics, collect the foetuses, put them into separate capsules and give them a proper burial.
They have proper tombs, made of bricks with eight pockets where they deposit the capsules.
They tile them so they look respectable, and to date they have buried 21,000 foetuses.
They only get access to these foetuses three times a week. I asked them what do they do with them the other days?
They said they’re taken away for research to be conducted on them.
The Sister said that when she started doing it, she asks these unborn children to intercede for her in her ministry, and since then she has found that she has received enormous and unexpected help – pointing to us as one such example.
The Sisters also go to the local hospitals where patients are not provided any meals or facilities to make meals.
So every morning she and her Sisters provide soup and hot water, which they use for their tea, coffee etc.
She also visits the disabled in their homes – the ones unable to come out – and supplies them with what little assistance they can – that is, home visitation, taking vegetables, dry fish and whatever they receive themselves.
Once a month, the Sisters provide 300 of these disabled people with milk and small quantities of rice, depending on what the Sisters can afford.
We gave money to buy 100 10kg bags of rice, which they distributed to 100 people for their families.
The Sisters started the orphanage seven years ago and, to date, have 93 children ranging from two weeks to seven years old.
The Sisters feed, clothe, bathe and educate them, including art and music, and ensure they are prioritised over the adults. Out of the 93, 13 are handicapped.
It is believed that they are victims of the infamous Agent Orange episode, where the local crops were sprayed with the chemical by the US during the Vietnam War, and today it’s now leaking into the food chain and large numbers of children are born severely deformed.
The premises at the moment that they use are too small for all the children and, due to the range in their age group, they need to separate them for their own safety.
They find it very difficult to accommodate them so they sleep on the verandahs, and the infants don’t sleep on mattresses during the day, just the hard steel of the cots, as the Sisters can’t afford nappies for the babies’ daily needs.
So the big problem facing the Sisters at the moment is accommodation because the numbers are increasing virtually on a daily basis. They are keen to see the completion of these new premises; and the initial stages of construction have started.
When they first told me about their order, I told them they have to love the cross in what they’re doing, as it’s such a challenging mission – and she smiled when I explained it that day.
In the same village where the orphanage is, we met a blind old woman with five children, four of whom are severely disabled, whose husband left her when she went blind.
Her daughter – her only child who is not disabled – is now married with four of her own children. She comes daily and is a carer to her mother and her disabled sibling brothers, all whom are over 20.
The woman and her sons are totally incapacitated. The boys crawl, they can’t toilet themselves, and live in a house infested by rats.
When it rains heavily, the floor floods.
The house is about the size of a bedroom in the average house in Australia – more like a shack. I asked the Sisters to give me an estimate of what it would cost to bring the shack up to some sort of respectable standard, given their desperate situation.
They managed to get me a price and I’ve asked her to go ahead and put a proper roof over their head, re-do the walls that are currently rotting timber, and fix the floor.
It needs to be said, we’re not exactly rich. My wife and I are what I’d call an average middle class family.
But what we consider spare change quite literally changes the lives of these people, who live in conditions that we can’t even comprehend until we see it for ourselves.
When I looked back at the photos after the trip, preparing this article for The Record, it brought tears to my eyes again. It brought their reality into focus. The situation in Vietnam almost beggars belief.
While we visited in August, the Sisters and the children at the orphanage put on a concert for us, even performing an Indian skit, as they knew we were originally from India.
It must be said, their musical skills and synchronisation to the music was astounding – though we’re no experts on music…
The Sisters will be visiting Perth and the Vietnamese Catholic Community is hosting a fundraiser for them on September 14 at 52 Albert St, North Perth at 7pm, where they will have a dinner and talks by the Sisters on their mission.
For details, contact Trevor on (08) 9453 6847.