Michael Nguyen SVD
…I love the Aborigines in Central Australia due to their unique characteristics: quiescence and gentleness, to name a few. I feel with the Indigenous for I myself have also lost many. The Fall of Saigon in 1975 snatched me away from my family and pushed me to the ocean. I was emotionally uprooted from my Vietnamese roots in order to become a vagabond!
For quite a long time (more than four years), I breathed into my lungs the clean desert air, met the desert inhabitants, and shared with them the joy as well as the sadness… A few people asked me what sort of projects that I had contributed to the Aboriginal Australians in the desert. I thought over about the question and then answered, “Dear Sir, dear Miss., dear Mr., for four years to be in the desert, honestly I did nothing except to dwell and journey along with the Aboriginal Australians… I walked with them, I laughed out loud with them, and of course, I also burst into tears with them. If they felt joyful, I shared their joy. If they became sad, I shared their sadness. The Aboriginal and I became one. There was a time I had envisaged my wet tomb among the many greenery tombs of the Aboriginal Australians. These were all that I contributed and envisaged in the desert. No more no less!
In the Australian desert, when it is getting cold, the Indigenous and I set the bonfire, sit next to one another, and watched the Milky Way galaxy stretched out before our eyes like a shiny river sparkling with millions of diamonds across the desert sky. It was cold, actually freezing, and yet because we sat next to one another, the Indigenous and I no longer felt cold; the heat of human love and the fire kept each individual inhabitant of the desert during the winter feeling warm.
Having lived with the Aboriginal Australians for more than four years, I recall a Vietnamese proverb, “Travelling so you can know! Staying at home with your mother, you never become wise!” Being wise? Surely I am not a wise man. But I know that living in the desert and working with the custodians of the land, I have been converted and become more mature. I am more tolerant and compassionate to myself and above to all people of different cultures.
Indeed, I have been transformed in the desert through the ones I served…
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