Canadian Mennonite
Volume 10, No. 03
February 6, 2006
Thai accountant has a taste for service
Calgary
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F or Ratthaya Nanthasen, a native of Thailand, crunching numbers just did not hold the same allure as direct interaction with people. After earning a degree in accounting she soon discovered it was a field she did not wish to pursue. Instead, she decided to concentrate on social work, an interest that had surfaced when she was a teenager.
For the past nine months, Nanthasen has served as an outreach worker for Calgary Lao Community Mennonite Church, visiting the Lao and Thai people in the area, reading them the Bible, offering counselling services and teaching Sunday school. She works hard at uniting the Lao people in the community, which can sometimes be difficult due to a lack of communication. “I come to the church and get to know the people,” she explains. “I try to help them to grow and come together.”
Nanthasen came to Canada in 2002 as part of the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) International Visitor Exchange Program. She volunteered for one year with Calgary’s Mennonite Centre for Newcomers. It was during this time that she first visited Calgary Lao Mennonite Church and soon found herself attending services on a regular basis. She became an active member, assisting the worship team and helping with fundraising. After returning home to Thailand for a time, Nanthasen received an invitation to return to Calgary and help out full-time at Lao Mennonite Church, an invitation she happily accepted.
While in Canada, Nanthasen is aided by Doreen Neufeld, former co-pastor of Trinity Mennonite Church, Calgary, who serves as a personal mentor to her, offering moral support and assisting with the gathering of Sunday school material.
Neufeld recognizes Nanthasen’s many gifts and abilities, along with her devotion to ministry. “I see her as conveying her deep faith to the people she works with, and seeking to be a bridge to lead them back to faith and to the church,” she says.
Nanthasen displayed some of her gifts and abilities at the “Taste of Mennonite Church Canada” event held at Calgary First Mennonite Church in October. The event was a culmination of the fall meetings of MC Canada’s Witness and Formation councils. The banquet consisted of exotic dishes provided by Lao Community Mennonite Church, followed by the sharing of mission stories by Witness and Formation members.
Along with helping organize the event, Nanthasen was assisted in preparing and serving the food. After the feast, she sang and performed a traditional Thai dance—an unexpected bonus to the 130 people present.
Perhaps the most noticeable contribution to the evening was her decorative fruit carvings. The elaborate display served as a visual centrepiece for the banquet and was later auctioned off.
Thanks to the efforts of Nanthasen and others involved, “Taste of MC Canada” gave staff and board members an opportunity to meet and get to know the community, while, at the same time, raising more than $12,000 for MC Canada ministries.
Nanthasen’s work with Lao Mennonite Church came to an end in December. She is currently hoping to extend her visa, so she can stay in Canada for pastoral training and psychology studies before returning to Thailand to continue in church ministry.
Neufeld is hopeful that Nanthasen will be able to stay in Canada to complete her training. “I feel it is a privilege to know Ratthaya,” she says. “My prayer is that she will be able to realize her goals, so she can use her gifts in service to God.”
Frightened by white faces
Winnipeg
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When Serge Kaptegaine walked into a Mennonite church in Winnipeg one sunny summer morning, he turned to leave—frightened by all the white faces in the congregation.
It was his first church experience since arriving in Canada as a refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo just two months earlier. Kaptegaine recalls the two words from the pulpit that stopped him in his tracks: “merciful peace.” He sat down, suddenly eager to hear more.
Captured and held in eastern Congo for 18 months, and enduring “every humiliation you can imagine,” the 30-year-old French teacher confesses he had lost his faith in God.
Raised as a Baptist in a country torn apart by civil war, Kaptegaine had grown disillusioned with a church unwilling to work for peace. Aligning with friends in a makeshift peace team, Kaptegaine sought to bring rival rebels into dialogue with one another—a nearly unheard of venture in eastern Congo. It was during a trip to another village to arrange one such meeting that he fell into the wrong hands.
Sharing a hole in the ground with other captives and sometimes corpses, he somehow got a message out through a friend. A sympathetic priest bribed a guard, helped him escape, and spirited the soft-spoken village teacher out of the country.
There was not a lot of time to make decisions. The priest recommended Canada—and specifically, Winnipeg. The priest had visited Winnipeg once. “It is a nice-sized city for you,” Kaptegaine recalls the priest saying.
Before he was able to get word to his wife and two young children, Kaptegaine found himself on the doorstep of Welcome Place, a transition centre for newcomers in Winnipeg. A conversation with his settlement counsellor about local churches led him to Home Street Mennonite Church—and his frightening encounter with an all-white congregation.
Kaptegaine is a natural connector. His gentle spirit and compassion for others draw people in. Since arriving in Canada last April, he has found himself the humble and grateful recipient of much goodwill. He has an apartment and a job as a French teaching assistant at a Winnipeg high school. He has received some financial aid to help bring his wife and daughters—whom he located in temporary housing in Germany—to Canada. On Christmas Day alone he had five invitations to join with various colleagues and friends in celebrating Jesus’ birth.
But his soul remains restless. “My country, my people, need this Mennonite message of peace,” he says with a deeply rooted passion. “Where are the Mennonites in eastern Congo?” He has lost seven members of his family to the fighting, including his mother and sister. The conflict has consumed an additional four million Congolese lives.
“A businessman will not go into a country that is insecure,” he says. “But the church is not a business. The church, with its message of peace, needs to be exactly in the places that are not secure.”
He is grateful, to be sure, for his new home in Canada, and sees here the possibilities for what his people back home need most: empowerment and personal transformation. International mission projects are good at helping indigenous people build needed infrastructure such as hospitals, he says, but hastens to add, “Once my people have peace, we can build the hospital.”
Kaptegaine is so committed to peacebuilding that he is changing his career. He has already become the coordinator of Hand in Hand for Peace in the Congo, a local Congolese group working to raise awareness of a conflict he feels the media has forgotten about. “I don’t understand why the media was so concerned with Michael Jackson issues. There is so much else, so many other stories to tell,” he told a Winnipeg Free Press writer.
He recently began part-time conflict resolution studies at Menno Simons College. An able and articulate presenter, he has received numerous invitations to speak at local events—events that have also billed the likes of University of Winnipeg president Lloyd Axworthy, MP Rey Pagtakhan and filmmaker Sacha Trudeau.
What Serge Kaptegaine has all along felt in his heart—the gospel message of love, peace and reconciliation for all of humanity and creation—has for him become deeply rooted in a place far from his home. His story has just begun.
Working with other church partners, Mennonite Church Canada contributes $30,000 annually to ministry in the Congo. Ironically, Congo has the third-largest number of Mennonites and Brethren in Christ members in the world (more than 194,000 according to Mennonite World Conference 2003 figures); the majority is located in the less-conflicted western region. [Canadian Mennonite featured “Congo: A forgotten emergency” in its Oct. 17 issue. Ed.]