[Photo: Vietnamese version of the Blessed
Mother with the Child Jesus on the top floor of a house. Taken in Ho Chi Minh
(Saigon), Vietnam.]
I was fortunate to have visited Vietnam
many years ago when the Salesians there celebrated their 50 years of presence
in the country.
Since it was a communist-ruled country, you
would expect some things to be done differently. When we visited Dalat, for
example, we could not sleep at the local Salesian House. (Dalat is like our
Baguio in the Philippines.) Foreigners are not allowed to sleep in the homes of
the locals. So the Salesians had to book us at a nearby pension house. The
grand finale of the golden anniversary celebration was at Ho Chi Minh City
(Saigon). The Salesians had to secure permission from the police to bring youth
from different provinces to the city for the celebration. And they had to stop
at various checkpoints in order to show the required permits.
Beyond that everything was a fine learning
experience of a different culture.
For the culminating Mass for the golden
anniversary of Salesian presence in Vietnam, the color was not gold but yellow.
That color must have been dictated by the culture.
The items for the program after the Mass were
cultural presentations. It was like being present for a “Linggo ng Wika”
program.
The patterns of the costumes worn by the
youth from the mountain communities looked similar to what I have seen in Baguio.
Even their basket backpacks looked familiar. Do these mountain communities and
the tribes from the Cordilleras share a common ancestry? Did the land bridges
make the migration to the Philippines possible?
There are a lot of motorcycles in the
streets of Saigon. The only other place where I saw a lot of motorcycles was in
Jakarta. It presented me with a problem. How do you cross the street without
being run over by them? Our confreres shared with us their secret. Slowly cross
the street while looking at the riders. The riders will be the ones to avoid hitting
you. I succeeded in crossing the street unscathed. And they declared me an honorary
citizen of Ho Chi Minh City.
Every culture has developed its own
alcoholic beverage. Goa (India) has feni (also spelled fenny and feny.) It is a
country liquor fermented from the juice of the cashew fruit. Vietnam boasts its
own liquor, the snake wine. It is an alcoholic beverage produced by infusing
whole snakes in rice wine or grain alcohol (Wikipedia). It is supposed to
possess curative properties.
I have visited the US several times. And
one of the things that surprised me was the number of obese people walking in
the streets. I place the blame on their diet and the size of the servings in restaurants
and fast foods. I remember our first morning in California. We went to a diner for
breakfast. We had to share. The servings were so huge that it was impossible
for one person to finish the food by himself. In contrast I did not see obese
people in Dalat and Saigon. I attribute this to their diet. They eat plenty of
vegetables.
There’s another thing that caught my attention.
We were on our way to Dalat when we passed a certain locality. I noticed that many
of the new houses were three-storey’s high. And on the verandah on the top
floor of some of these houses one can see more-than-life-size statues of Mary
and the Child Jesus. More often than not these were dressed in Vietnamese
traditional clothing. I asked our Vietnamese confreres about this. They told us
that when the communists took over the North, many Catholics fled to the South.
There they established themselves into communities. These statues signal the
presence of these Catholics in that particular locality.
The presence of Mary in the religious consciousness
of Catholics is not surprising. It is in fact one of the signs that identifies
a Catholic. And if that Catholic is a Filipino, then you can almost be sure of
a Marian devotion that is both tender and fierce. This fierceness can only be
understood if one also understands that to the Filipino, Mary is above all “ina”.
It is for this reason that Filipino
Catholics have earned the well-deserving title of “pueblo amante de Mara”.
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