We present Maria Hà Thị Thu Lan, from the community of San Benito Menni (Chu Hai), Việt Nam.
How long have you been part of the Sisters Hospitallers Congregation?
I joined the Congregation in 2005 to learn about and live the Hospitaller mission, with the desire to help people suffering from mental illness or disability.
In 2007 I began my postulancy. It lasted one year and in 2008 I started the novitiate stage. This lasted two years. In 2010, I made my first profession. From that date I joined the Congregation. Temporarily, I renewed my profession and vows every year until, in 2017, I took the ring, that is, I made my perpetual profession. Today marks 18 years since I met the Hospitallers living and working in the Congregation’s mission in Vietnam.
What is your purpose, your mission within the Congregation of the Hospitaller Sisters?
I identify with what our constitutions say: Our reason for being in the Church is the exercise of hospitaller charity, lived in a state of religious consecration according to the model of perfect charity, Christ symbolized in his Heart. I translate this into the following:
To have a personal and fraternal, sincere and gratuitous love for the sisters of one’s own community;
To have an attitude of kindness and tenderness and in patient, continuous, self-sacrificing and joyful service to the sick, to disabled children “living images of Jesus.
To welcome everyone we meet, with a simple and humble lifestyle.
From my possibilities, I try to do the best I can the task that has been entrusted to me. I have been in charge of the center for 3 years with children and adults with physical and mental disabilities. We work to make their lives easier, so that they acquire personal autonomy and self-esteem through respect, listening, love, trust and hope so that they feel useful and find meaning in their lives, according to their abilities. And with the most affected, we try to acquire behavioral habits, rehabilitation and try to make them happy.
What added value does practicing the hospital project give to your life?
The contact with the hospitaller task makes me a more understanding person with vulnerability, more tolerant with myself and with other people, more patient, more understanding, more merciful and compassionate. This is what I aspire to as the ideal of every Hospitaller Sister: to become configured to the merciful and compassionate Christ (Const. No. 2).
Our foundress, Maria Josefa, asked us to be like true mothers to the sick and disabled. I believe that I am acquiring this through practice.
The practice of the hospital values, made explicit in the Framework of Identity, makes me a better person.
