by Nguyen Van Tranh
In the central high plains, working conditions for missionaries are often prohibitive; no roads, obstacles such as local authorities and language barriers, the most urgent that need to be tackled. A mission that concentrates on the spiritual and material well being of the individual.
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Kon Tum (AsiaNews) – Discriminated against by the local government, a serious lack of priests, those few present forced to under take perilous journeys to reach the communities spread throughout the territory, language problems and lack of food. These are just some of the numerous challenges facing the Vietnamese Catholic Church in its daily mission in the central high plains, an area which covers the diocese of Kontum, Pleiku, Ban Me Thuot, Qui Nhon and Da Lat.
The small numbers of priests who work in this vast territory are often subjected to discrimination and are hindered by the local governments, despite their generous efforts to bring concrete aid and spiritual comfort to people who are living in conditions of extreme poverty. The lack of transport and infrastructure further increases their difficulty: a problem not only for the priests who want to visit local communities to celebrate mass with them, but also for children, often subjected to long treks on foot under driving rain through rugged territory in order to attend catechism and hear the Word of God. Frequently the living conditions that the missionaries meet with have remained unchanged from those encountered by the first French missionaries who first came to Kontum and Ban Me Thuat territories in the XIX century.
In order to further encounters and dialogue, many missionaries study local dialects spoken by the people, in particular those used by the ethnic minorities. Bahnar is widely spoken in the mountainous areas of the country: as an aid to evangelisation the priests have translated the Bible and some of the primary prayers into the local dialect, submitting the translations for approval to the Vietnamese Bishops Conference. The bishops approved the new text in 2006. Besides Bahnar, translations have also been drafted in Jrai and Xôñaêng.
The missionaries work goes beyond preaching the Gospel, inserting the Word of God into a wider context of projects to support the local population, marked by high levels of malnutrition despite the fact the area is a major rice producer. An onerous job but a necessary one to guarantee minimum subsistence, a testimony of how the local Church is attentive to the spiritual and material needs of its people.