Vietnamese refugee returns home as Franciscan lay missionary

Published: 2004-07-01

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam (CNS) -- Hoa Nguyen gave up a job as a software engineer with the Intel Corp. in Portland, Ore., to return to his homeland of Vietnam as a lay missionary. Hoa, 30, a former refugee, is serving a three-year stint as a Franciscan Mission Service volunteer in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon and once the capital of South Vietnam. He fled Vietnam in 1975, at age 2, with his mother and four sisters, as North Vietnamese Army troops approached Da Nang, near where his impoverished family lived. His father and elder brother worked as woodcutters and were left behind in the confusion. They were reunited with the family four years later. Hoa is working with Hansen's disease patients at the base of the Hai Van Pass in central Vietnam, outside Da Nang, a port city. At the camp, the leprosy patients greet him with smiles and handshakes. Eighty-nine families are confined to an infirmary on an isolated beach. Patients worry that they will be relocated to make way for a tourist resort. Hoa told a visiting journalist from the Catholic Sentinel, newspaper of the Archdiocese of Portland, that mission service is an opportunity to repay God for the blessings he has received.

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