Hospitality to the world
02.07.2010
His family’s hospitality to ‘the outsider’ had a profound effect on Columban Fr Peter O’Neill, to the extent that he dedicated his life to that cause in St Columban’s Mission Society.
Fr Peter O’Neill recalls the Vietnamese foods and flavours that were passed around his family’s kitchen table on a Sunday. It was a departure from the traditional fare that normally graced the O’Neill menu. Vietnamese food wasn’t popular in Geelong in the 1970s but it was enjoyed by the O’Neill family once a month when they played host to many newly-arrived Vietnamese refugees as part of a volunteer resettlement program in Australia.
Hospitality was abundant in the O’Neill kitchen, and no matter how many people lined up for a meal there was always room for someone else. This generous spirit and big-hearted approach to life, especially to those Vietnamese refugees, had a huge impact on Peter’s life and influenced his decision to join the Columbans in 1982.
‘These visitors would show us how to cook Vietnamese food and how to play soccer, and we would teach them how to play football and we taught them Australian slang! My parents were a great example to me as a teenager; they always welcomed the stranger, reminded us how lucky we were to live in peace and told us not to take the blessings we have for granted.’
Peter was attracted to the Columbans because of the missionary work that would take him beyond his own shores, to places and people he had learned to respect and admire as a teenager. Two of his nine years as a seminarian were in Japan, which fuelled his passion for Asia.
‘When I spent some time in Japan I worked closely with people who were marginalised and I became keen to follow that work after my ordination’, he says.
Peter was ordained in 1990 and a year later he was sent to Taiwan, one of 15 countries where the Columbans work. Nineteen years down the track he is a vital part of the social justice network that advocates and provides services for the poor, especially people who have been trafficked into Taiwan.
He speaks Mandarin and Taiwanese and still studies the intricacies of the Chinese language in order to understand the legal documents that he regularly discusses with government officials to achieve a better outcome for trafficked people and those languishing in detention centres.
Fr Peter is now the Diocesan Migrant Chaplain and Coordinator of the Hsinchu Catholic Diocese Migrants and Immigrants Service Centre. It has grown in recent years to meet an unfortunate increase in the number of people, trafficked into the country for labour and sex work. The diocese now runs five shelters for trafficked people and abused migrant workers.
‘About five years ago, I became aware of trafficking and so now a lot of my work focuses on lobbying for these people and working with the government to have laws introduced that will protect them. In Taiwan there is a close link between labour and trafficking which means a lot of people come into the country with work documents and are then trafficked,’ he says.
Many women come into Taiwan with work documents to care for elderly family members. Fr Peter recalls a case where one family hired four women from Indonesia to look after elderly grandparents and they were forced into slave-like conditions, working into the night and early morning caring for children, cleaning, cooking, and forced to work in the family’s restaurant.
Caregivers coming into Taiwan from other countries are paid half what local caregivers get paid.
Fr Peter and a social worker from the Migrants and Immigrants Service Centre met three of these women, who had eventually escaped the family and ended up in a detention centre. The Service Centre offers people in the detention centre counselling and support and will try and access whatever they need to have their cases heard.
The case involving the four women is a test case in Taiwan as the Service Centre closely monitors the progress of the case in court against their employer, the accused trafficker. Already, the women have been recognised as trafficked women, and the centre has helped the women get back their unpaid wages and find new employment.
For almost two decades, Fr Peter has lived among those who are poor, vulnerable and exploited and he, along with many others, has worked to create better services, conditions and laws for these people. Surely one story merges into another and the faces of people are lost in the detail of events ‘I have to make sure that I am not numb to each person’s story. I have a spiritual director and we meet regularly to share my experiences. This helps me to reflect, and reminds me to acknowledge the pain each has gone through and not to lose compassion for them. What has happened to them makes me sad or mad and keen to stop it happening to someone else,’ he says.
Reprinted with permission, Madonna Magazine.
