1329 Patience in a Muslim country - young missionary reflects
austraLasia 1329
Patience in a Muslim country - young missionary
reflects
KHARTOUM: 15th November 2005 -- Khartoum is a long way
from East Asia or Oceania, yet here on the African Continent, several
missionaries from EAO are at work. The following is a missionary
reflection, very personal, quite precious. It comes from a young
Vietnamese missionary working in the Sudan. Patience as a Vietnamese living in an Islamic
nation he entitles his letter, then attempts to set out what he
means by this, beginning with the realisation that people are simple
and sincere, but that their uncomplaining acceptance of direction from
a respected foreigner masks another reality - they may not actually
like doing what they are being asked to do. The letter extends
this reality in a reflective way.
"Our orientation is to live and to serve our mission
in this country, and our mission in Sudan needs a spirit of
self-forgetting, with the spirit of Jesus: come to serve, not to be
served. Salesians who have been here long before me tell me - to
stay here you need patience to work with these people. Here we have to
learn from them how they live instead of coming here just with the idea
of educating them. That means we should be like them, and nothing like
them! This means dialogue. It means going slow. It
means day by day.
"In their families, the boys do not have things like
they have in our school. This is why they don't know how to use
things. Occasionally things go wrong and they don't tell us or
they are unable to take responsibility for it. I say they don't
know how to use things but when I tell them how they don't care about
it. For example, they don't switch off the lights in the workshop
because at home they don't have lights, or if they have lights then
they don't need to switch them off because they will be connected to a
generator. For them, when the generator is off the lights are off.
" In an Islamic country, our boys are influenced
(naturally) by Islamic culture. Our Catholic boys cannot
distinguish between the Feast of All Saints and the Feast of
Ramadan. Everything too is under Islamic control including
religious activities. We have to be very careful.
"Everyone is looking for money. Our school is
burdened a lot when we have to do something. When they know they
are dealing with a Catholic school, we end up having to pay a lot of
money, instead of cooperating with us in the education of the
young. Cooperation means cooperating to get money, and to keep
things peaceful we have to pay. Even with our workers - there is
no problem when they are working alongside us, but when something goes
wrong, and we have to stop them for one or another reason, then they
immediately file for a court case.
" To see Salesians working with lay people is
perhaps, then, still far away in the Sudan. It takes time.
20 years on in Sudan the Salesian mission still struggles."
We can assure this young missionary of our interest
and our prayer.
________________________
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