Live Encounters Magazine Volume Two November-December 2024.
Sister Marie Catherine Dungmaly, A down-to-earth Saint (03.07.1930 – 12.01.22)
by Percy Aaron.
Marie Catherine Dungmaly was surely a saint.
I first met Sr Catherine, as I knew her, when a colleague asked if I would be willing to help a seventy-year-old Catholic nun improve her English. He was going back to Australia for medical treatment and didn’t know when he would be back.
I had been getting up early on Sunday mornings to teach disadvantaged children at a temple in a distant suburb but dropped out after a few weeks when it seemed obvious that the project was more about proselytization than altruism.
So, when Steve asked me to teach this nun, I wanted to know first if she was into conversions. She wasn’t he assured me, and since he was as averse to religion as I was, I agreed to meet her.
Sr Catherine was tiny bubbly nun in her early 70s. ‘Steve!’ she exclaimed, a beam across her face. Steve, a burly Vietnam-war vet bent down and gave her a big hug.
After the introductions, he told me what I had to do. And what to not do. ‘Don’t let her push you around,’ he advised. ‘She’s a stubborn old b@%!h. Give her a kick up the a@!e, when she deserves it.’ Steve was the archetypical abrasive Australian, as diplomatic as a derailed locomotive. I’d heard him swear at everybody but was taken aback that he was saying this to her face. Sr Catherine laughed, crouched in a karate position, then swung her hands to deliver a mock chop. Towering above her, he bent down and gave her another big hug. Twenty years younger than the nun, he was clearly under her spell.
Soon I was visiting Nazareth House, the home for girls aged 9 to 20 that she had founded many years before. Very quickly it became apparent that though English was her fifth language, she needed no help with it. She was fluent in Vietnamese, French, Lao and Thai and also spoke with considerable facility, Hmong and Khmu, two of Laos’s ethnic languages.
Like Steve, I was falling under Sr Catherine’s spell. Gradually my two-hours-once-a-week lessons became 3-4 hour-sessions every couple of days. The English lessons were forgotten as we chatted politics and poverty, classical music and church doctrine, culture and Communism. and a host of other subjects in between. A voracious reader, she devoured the books I borrowed for her. The French classics she lent me were way above my interest and comprehension levels and after keeping them for a few weeks unopened, I’d give them back deftly avoiding any discussions.
Her fondness for certain kinds of French cheese – she always gave me half when she received gifts – was the result of the years she had spent in France, I thought. But then her tastes in music and literature, her ability with languages and her sophisticated mannerisms, betrayed the Mandarin influence from her mother’s side. She once told me that she was distantly related to Bảo Đại, the last emperor of Vietnam but didn’t want to discuss him further.
Sr Catherine would squeal with laughter every time, I told her an anti-clergy joke. ‘I must tell this one to the bishop,’ she’d often say. When she said that she belonged to the Sisters of Charity of Saint Jeanne-Antide Thouret, I teased her that even God didn’t know how many orders of nuns there were. She was rather tickled at that comment.
As our friendship developed, I admitted to her my initial misgivings about her being into religious conversions. ‘Poverty knows no religion,’ she replied sadly. ‘Most of the girls here are from the ethnic groups. And they are mainly animists.’ Later, I would observe that it was she, who educated them about their culture and traditions.
Sr Catherine looked forward to my visits, she told me. I took her mind off the daily problems she faced finding food and finances for the fifty-five children and the twenty or so nuns and lay helpers at Nazareth House. I admitted that I too looked forward to seeing her as she had become my caffeine fix.
Slowly, our roles changed as she became my teacher: brushing up my French and helping me learn Lao. Her profound insights into various Southeast Asian cultures and her experience with the children definitely informed my teaching practices.
In the large kitchen where the meals were prepared, she showed me how to make spring rolls and vegetable soups. Often, I’d stay for lunch, sitting opposite her, while she taught me how to wrap lettuce around certain food without splattering the contents over my shirt, or how to cut fruit efficiently. I couldn’t help but notice how deftly and daintily she handled the cutlery. After a while the bland diet for octogenarians (at seventy-four, she was one of the younger nuns) soon had me making all sorts of excuses to avoid meals there.
When I asked for help with my garden, she dropped by to make an assessment. She looked around, suggested what should be planted and where and then started pulling out weeds and tossing broken flower pots into the centre of the garden. Days later, she returned with her gardener, in a dilapidated Toyota pickup filled with saplings and flower pots. She instructed the young man to chop down a large tree to its stump and seeing my expression, explained that the tree was diseased and needed to ‘breathe’. Plants were uprooted and the soil prepared. On subsequent visits more saplings were planted, flower pots arranged and the pond drained and cleaned. Three large lotuses were floated in it and orchids hung at the entrance. Within a couple of weeks, my garden was transformed into a mini rainforest.
It wasn’t only in languages, or gardening, or cooking that Sr Catherine’s all-round abilities amazed me. When I gifted her half a dozen guitars so that the children could learn the instrument, she picked up one and started strumming a few chords. I would sometimes find her in the chapel playing Bach or Vivaldi or singing one of her favourite choral pieces. Then I knew that something was troubling her and would sit quietly in the last pew until she had finished. Steve had introduced me to the music of Palestrina and I recorded some for her. Soon this 16th century composer became one of her favourites.
She sketched, painted water colours and did embroidery.
Early one morning, Sr Catherine telephoned. She had never called at such an early hour. ‘Percy, please be here for breakfast at 7.30.’ It was almost an order. I showered, dressed and rushed to Nazareth House wondering what the matter was. The children should have already left for school but they were all assembled in front of the main building, dressed in their school uniforms. The doors to the chapel were wide open and there were flowers everywhere. Had one of the nuns passed away? Inside the chapel, the older nuns were sitting in the front pews.
As usual, she was in the centre of everything, supervising a dozen things. Then a motorcade drove up and five men emerged, dressed in black soutanes, two of them with red zucchettos or skullcaps. From the last car four men in ill-fitting light blue suits climbed out. Sr Catherine shook hands with all of them, then introduced some of us. I didn’t catch any names. After mass, we had breakfast in the refectory and I gathered that the cleric sitting next to me was an Italian monsignor. The men in the blue suits stood in the doorways, one of them clicking the occasional photograph.
After the motorcade drove off, there were so many questions for Sr Catherine. She apologized for the short notice, then said that one of the men was the apostolic nuncio, or papal ambassador, to Thailand. The others were emissaries from John Paul II. The Vatican had sent a high-level delegation to negotiate with the government on granting greater religious freedom. And who were the men in the blue suits? They were the secret police, she answered. I was not too pleased about my photographs ending up in the files of the Ministry of Public Security.
Sr Catherine was implacably anti-Communist. As a young girl in her native Vietnam, she was awe-struck seeing giants for the first time: huge Africans from the French colonies, packed into trucks. She mentioned the troop movements in the village and the headman told her to be careful but report everything back to him. This she found very exciting. But her attitude to the Communists changed the day her father was put in a bamboo cage just high enough for him to crouch and displayed in the village square. He lay in the hot sun deprived of food and water. When she ran to him with a mug of water, one of the men knocked it out of her hand.
The villagers were called upon to denounce him but they refused insisting that he was a good man, ever ready to help others till their lands. For two days he lay there before being released. Later she learned that her father had complained to the headman about the excesses of the Viet Minh who would arrive at night to squeeze the villagers for their meagre stocks of rice and vegetables. That her father was a staunch Catholic, was another reason, she strongly felt. More than sixty years later, her lips would quiver when talking about that incident. Catholic good, Communist bad, was her simple philosophy. President Ngo Dinh Diem, the former South Vietnam dictator was a good man, she always insisted.
Her animosity towards Communism was not directed at individuals. She admitted openly that her work in the country was possible only because of closet Catholics and other sympathetic people in authority.
During the very difficult post-independence years, she was always ensured a steady supply of military uniforms to sew. Though there were no cash payments for the work, the rations she received in compensation were adequate to feed her nuns and others.
In 2006, at the government’s request, she opened the Luang Prabang Deaf and Dumb Centre. During one particularly heavy monsoon, the mountainous roads were blocked due to landslides and food supplies were running low. She went to see a very high official in the national airline to plead for a discount in the air-freight. The man told her furiously that the airline was not his private business and tossed the letter back at her.
She was out of the building when she noticed the red stamp on the paper with his signature: the 200 kg of rice and other supplies were to be flown to Luang Prabang absolutely free of charge. Once in Sydney, the check-in staff at the Thai counter allowed me an additional 45 kg over my allowance at no additional charge, when I mentioned that I was carrying clothes and toys for an orphanage in Vientiane.
‘I really worry when the younger girls, or older nuns fall sick late at night’, she once said. ‘They can’t wait till the morning and admitting them to a hospital at night is a big problem.’ I mentioned this to a friend who had been a professional nurse back in her country. Before the end of the week, my friend had collected medical supplies to run workshops in first aid for the younger nuns, though she insisted that they call her at any time of the day or night. Catherine, she added, handled the syringes and the IV tubes like a trained medic. Later, I learned that my friend was bringing in medical supplies in her embassy’s diplomatic bag, with the full permission of the ambassador.
Sr Catherine seemed to work her little miracles on me too. Every now and again, she would ask me to fix her desktop. My knowledge of computer hardware is limited to a little more than the ON/OFF switch. I’d tell her that I would bring in an expert on my next visit but she’d insist that I first give it a try. The problem would be solved and when asked what I had done, I had absolutely no idea. She’d dictate letters to me in French and despite my basic knowledge, there would be very few mistakes when she’d proofread.
The younger children, when not at school, were always hanging around and the five or six dogs she had adopted were like a security detail. She had to pet or talk to them before they went off wagging their trails. When we walked near the enclosure where the cows grazed, the animals would walk along the fence until she had stroked their snouts and said some words to them. Then they’d twitch their ears and trot off.
Sr Catherine wanted to attend her grandnephew’s ordination in Los Angeles and asked my help in applying for her US visa. Late one evening after work I went to Nazareth House and started the tedious job of filling in a form designed by some brain-dead bureaucrats. She sat beside me, as I read out the questions and typed her answers. Had she ever been a member of the Nazi party? No. At another question I quickly clicked ‘No’ without reading it to her but she wanted to see what it was. If a septuagenarian nun’s laugh could be described as a guffaw, then that is what she did at being asked if “she was seeking to enter the United States to work as a prostitute or procurer”. At the embassy interview, the visa officer couldn’t understand why she wanted to travel all the way to Los Angeles for just one day: It would take her longer than that to make the round trip, he tried to make her understand.
Sr Catherine was so integral to Nazareth House, that thinking about what would happen to everything when she passed, depressed me immensely. But when the government asked her to set up the centre in Luang Prabang for children with hearing and speech disabilities, she willingly accepted, feeling that her work in Vientiane was complete.
For various reasons, my worst fears, soon came to pass. Stories of what was happening at Nazareth House after her departure upset her so much that she never set foot again in that place. Years later, when she was moved to the retirement home for nuns in Thakhek, her eyes would moisten, when anybody mentioned what they had seen there. I myself, never went back to Nazareth House again, after one such visit.
Once a month I would travel approximately six hours to Thakhek, about 350 km away, to see her. After a night’s stay, I’d visit her for an hour or two the next morning, then catch another dilapidated bus back to Vientiane. The return journeys were even longer as the driver and his helper stopped to smoke, drink, stuff passengers into standing position in the aisle and even load motorbikes on to the roof of the bus. Each time, I swore that it would be my last trip down south. But Sr Catherine was waiting for my visits and the books that I would carry there. Later, it made more sense to save my shoulder from injury by buying her a Kindle and loading up about 200 books at a time to keep her occupied for a month or so.
The pleurisy and other health problems didn’t slow her down and eventually the nuns got her a portable oxygen cylinder to drag along when she couldn’t sit still. Even then she was always thinking of others. She asked me for a knitting machine and endless supplies of wool so thar she could knit warm clothes for poor people to sell for an income.
But her inability to keep working for the poor was beginning to get her down. ‘I’m ready to go,’ she’d always say, on each visit. ‘When will the Lord call me?’
One January day, I received word that she was deteriorating fast. By the time I arrived in Thakhek, she was slipping in and out of consciousness. Everybody seemed to be waiting for me and a couple of them shouted into her ear in Lao and French that I had arrived – as if that was going to revive her. I sat next to her bedside and rested my hand on her forehead, then held her right hand in both mine. As her life was ebbing away, many memories floated past. And a thought – I had had many times before – came back to me: that I had been truly privileged to have actually known a saint.
Shortly after midnight, her Lord called her.
© Percy Aaron
Percy Aaron is an ESL teacher at Vientiane College in the Lao PDR and a freelance editor for a number of international organisations. He has had published a number of short stories, edited three books and was editor of Champa Holidays, the Lao Airlines in-flight magazine and Oh! – a Southeast Asia-centric travel and culture publication. As lead writer for the Lao Business Forum, he was also on the World Bank’s panel of editors. Before unleashing his ignorance on his students, he was an entrepreneur, a director with Omega and Swatch in their India operations and an architectural draughtsman. He has answers to most of the world’s problems and is the epitome of the ‘Argumentative Indian’. He can be contacted at percy.aaron@gmail.com
What a beautiful article on Sister Catherine.
She was always smiling and welcoming to Bec and I.
God Bless her.
Gerry Quinn