THE BUILDER OF DREAMS

The 50 years of apostolate of father John Visser, SDB,

between Thailand and Cambodia

From Sneek to Weert

What Father John remembers of his father is a hard working man who led his family with discipline and commitment. Gosse (a typical Frisian name) Visser ( born on April 12, 1906; he died on November 19, 1967) and his wife Margarita (b. July 31,1907) established their home in Sneek, Friesland ( Fryslan) which is a northern province of the Netherlands belonging to the Frisia Region; its capital is Leeuwarden ( Louwert ) . Friesland has actually a population of 643,000 inhabitants who speak their own dialect, the Frisian, besides the official Dutch language. This is today one of the biggest towns in a region famous for its castles and sporting activities. Agriculture is the most important economic activity even today. The famous black and white Frisian cows as well as the black Frisian horses are the pride of the region. Friesland has many geographical features that attract tourists. At the southeast of the region there are lakes and there are also some nice islands in the Wadden Sea in the north . About the Wadden Sea there is much to say: it is a very special place for a unique sporting event that only the determined Dutch people can perform: the Wadlopen , which consists on crossing the seabed between tides; it can be dangerous and the walkers can lose their route finding themselves trapped like the Egyptian cavalry pursuing Moses on the seabed of Red Sea. The province is also the main scenery of the Elfstedentocht (Eleven cities tour). a 200 kilometers ice skating event during winter. Friesland became famous too on February 26, 1782, being the first international body to recognize the independence of the United States of America from the United Kingdom of Britain.

Gosse Visser was a technician and worked in the municipality of Sneek as urban building planner, a profession that would become really useful for his country after the war (and which gave a good formation background for his son who'd do, one day, something similar in faraway countries in Asia ). Afterwards he became the director of Public Works in the municipality of Weert .

Margarita de Lange, as previously said, married with Gosse and they had eight children, 5 boys and 3 girls, the second of them was John.

In 1946, the Visser family left Sneek for the south, to Venlo , on the German border, a town nearly destroyed during the war. The profession of Gosse played an useful part in the reconstruction of this town after 1946. In 1953 the Visser Family left Venlo and went to their definitive new hometown: Weert, not far from Venlo . Weert is the place where the descendants of Gosse now live. Weert is located in the southeastern part of the Netherlands with a population of 48,558 inhabitants by 2005.

To the Dutch ”Valdocco”

“Valdocco” was that famous district in Turin , Italy , where Saint John Bosco began his apostolate amongst the poor youth of his time. The name of this place is pretty popular amongst the Salesian family and it is even used to rename the birthplace of a new educational project all over the planet.
The Dutch “Valdocco” was miles away from Weert, in Uchelen where the Salesian ran a juniorate and a gymnasium. John went to do his first studies over there (others in the family followed John to receive their education from the Salesians).
In 1953 John decided to join the novitiate of the Salesians of Don Bosco in Twello (municipality of Voorst in the province of Gelderland), about 5 kilometers southwest of Deventer and 15 kilometers away from Uchelen .The novitiate is a due experience for any person willing to join a Catholic religious community and it last one year, during which the novice has to meditate about the rules of the religious life, the spirituality of the founder and show commitment and courage to join and follow the charisma.
For the Salesian Family, for a young person willing to become a son or a daughter of Don Bosco, it is very important to find the love for the youth, especially for the one in need. At the end of the novitiate, the new religious takes his or her temporal vows that would last until he or she is ready to take the perpetual vows of obedience, poverty and chastity. Today vocations in Europe have become fewer due to a lot of reasons, but when John did his novitiate in Twello, things were very different in Europe and plenty of Catholic boys and girls joined eagerly the religious orders.
The Don Bosco's Order was in fact very attractive amongst the young people joining the Catholic community especially for the chances it offered to travel and work in missions outside Europe . Although the Salesian Order of Don Bosco is not known officially as a “Mission Ad Gentes” – a Catholic institution dedicated to missions in those regions of the world where Catholic Christians are a minority or don't even have a single parish -, the Salesian Order has been, since its foundation, one of the most dynamic and extensive Catholic institute outside Europe, present in the five continents. It was a very popular pastime in Catholic circles as well as in countryside parishes to listen to the stories of the “adventures” of the European Salesian missionaries in South America , India , China and Middle East , among others. Even Saint John Bosco himself used to read to his boys the chronicles of his Salesian missionaries in the Argentina 's Pampa , the southeast Tierra del Fuego in Chile and other places, tales which encouraged the fertile imagination of those young boys.
Life in the Salesian houses of the Netherlands was not much different from life in Italy , Spain or France . The Dutch boys who studied in the Salesian house knew the fascinating chronicles of the great apostles of Don Bosco such as Father Cocco in Japan , Fr.Variara in Colombia , Msgr. Versiglia and Fr. Calixto Caravario in China , such as the reports about curious traditions and customs of other lands and peoples. The years of war in Europe made communication with the missionaries difficult or impossible. But after the war, while the entire Europe was re-building itself from its ashes, like the Arabian phoenix, the stories from the missionaries came back again. In this context John, being a novice of the Salesians of Twello, did his missionary request to Fr. Ziggioti Rector Mayor of the Salesians at that time, offering himself to go anywhere on the globe to follow the path of the great missionaries of Don Bosco.

The first “profession” - the temporary vows – was taken on August 16, 1954 in Twello and John did two years of philosophy studies in the same place.

President Nasser closed the way

Fr. John Visser's first missionary post was not precisely outside Europe, but Italy , the home country of Don Bosco. His request for a mission's assignment was eventually accepted by his superiors in Rome and John Visser was notified that he should travel and work in a very mysterious country: Thailand, hitherto known as Siam: When John received the letter from Rome, it was the first time he heard that name, Thailand: the era of the Mass Media had not yet arrived, geographical names' changes was not a top priority topic in the schools during the European Post-War period, Thailand was not a Dutch interest area as Indonesia indeed was, and few Dutch People knew that the Thai government had changed the name of the country in 1948 from the old “Siam” to the even older “Thailand” which means “The Land of the Free People” and which had been in use centuries ago. It was great for young man to be sent to a place nobody seemed to know about. At the same time, the new post carried its difficulties, too: Trying to find any course of Thai language was impossible at that time in Holland : “You will learn it when you will be there”, was the answer given to him by his superiors.
In July 1956 John finished his philosophy studies in Twello and he did a two-months stint of practical training, after that he left for Belgium on September of that year to meet Fr Roosens.
Fr. Roosens was named the head of that missionary expedition and the idea was to go to Italy , join other Italian confreres and therefore sail to Thailand , but the good God had other plans for the young missionaries of Don Bosco….The Salesian missionaries used to travel by ship, but Egypt' s President Nasser's blockade of the Suez channel in 1956 forced the Salesian authorities to keep the group in Italy for three months , then to send John Visser' s group to destination by airplane. Thanks to Nasser , the young Visser got a chance to fly….

Thailand , the Kingdom of Smiles

It was Christmas 1956 and the new missionaries were received with joy in the Land of the Free. They had not much time to tour the country, as they were assigned at the Sarasith College in Southern Thailand , to study the local language and work as tutors for the boarders.
There were at the time 350 young boarders at the college, and Fr.Visser still says he has learnt from them more than he has taught them. His superiors in Sarasith were really happy with the new guy from Netherland, as he showed charisma and was good at teaching English and sports to the boarders.
Those first steps in Thailand would abruptly come to an end when John Visser's superiors ordered him to move to India to study Theology there.



The novice John Visser went to Shillong , in the state of Assam ( now Meghalaya) , a northeastern portion of India bordering China , to study philosophy.
Shillong now has a Don Bosco Museum and it is called the “Rock and Roll City” of India , due to the number of pop music stars hailing from this mountain town .
Back to 1960, St. Anthony College , in Shillong town, was the first ever University College worldwide of the Don Bosco Society, established in 1934.
The young missioner went onto a tough curriculum in philosophy and theosophy, his mind was working through Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Hegel and Co., while he was breathing on daily basis the subtle mystic atmosphere of Brahmanism and Buddhism, as the place at the time had a mixed religious populace.
After two years another change profiled in the destiny of the young Salesian, as the Chinese Army invaded part of the state in November 1962, forcing the Salesians to move out of the place all the faculties and the students, the Theologate ( the philosophy department) included, to southern India.
John Visser then was sent to Germany , in Bavaria , to continue his theology studies in Benedictbeuern's Abbey, where he received the official Salesian ordination on 29 June 1964. It was, as he describes it, "the biggest event" in his life.
He was now a priest, a true Salesian Missioner , ready for his real mission, to be an apostle of Jesus Christ and St. Giovanni Bosco .
He was ordered to return to Thailand , in Ban Pong, Petchburi province, where he became Prefect of the boarding students of the local Don Bosco Technical School , which had 300 children studying into.During the day, he had to teach and in the evenings, he was responsible for supervising the kids and making them play because, he says, "when you are with children and young people, it's important to do a lot of activities to make them grow."
Afterwards, his superiors sent him to Hatyai , Thailand 's third biggest city in the south of the country, near the malaysian border. With fundings from the Dutch government, he helped to build a college with 36 classrooms.
Father John served as the Administrator and vicar of the school, and the curious aspect of his tenure at the school was the fact the pupils were not forced to convert. "Our Salesian philosophy", he says, "is to turn children into good citizens for their country and God. We teach them human values and if they are Catholic, we also impart religious values. For children who belong to other religions, we teach moral classes. The Thai government actually wants all schools to have moral classes in their curriculum."
Father John remained in Hatyai until 1973, when his Salesians superiors decided that he was capable to take on greater responsibilities and projects. He spent two years in Rome , graduating in spiritual theology. Then he was again sent back to Thailand to become the Rector of the Don Bosco Technical School in Bangkok . The Salesians had actually thought of closing it because all the machinery used at the school was pretty outdated, but Father John managed to rebuild it.
"In late 1976," recalls Father John, "the King and Queen of Thailand paid a visit to the school, and the school itself became popular out of a sudden."
"Even today it is one of the country's best technical schools. Many of the former pupils have succeeded in life and now run their own businesses. They are self-made men who come from very poor backgrounds. We want our young people to like work. So it doesn't matter which subject you take: electrician, mechanic, or printer, but you must like your work. Laziness is the worst thing which can happen in your life. We impart that in these schools: the love for work, and the love of being an honest person."

Cambodia

Throughout the 1980s, Father John helped in setting up technical centers for Cambodians who had fled the killings fields of the Khmer Rouge and were living in the refugee camps at the Thai border. Then, in the early 1990s, Father John took a further step in his busy life. His superiors asked him to build a Don Bosco technical school in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh . A good portion of the country's intelligentzia had been killed, and at the time there was no vocational training in the Kingdom.
There are now many Don Bosco Technical Schools in Cambodia. The students there are mainly orphans or children coming from disadvantaged families.
The Khmer word “Sala Rian Don Bosco” nowadays means excellence in education in the Kingdom of Cambodia.
Father John, as he is commonly known in Cambodia, despite his age and the tiredness of a life of service and sacrifice, has no plans to retire, and he still likes to work for the youth.
He says:
"When my pupils come to school, they own nothing more than their trousers. When they leave the school, it's just a matter of a few months and they come back to visit the old friends riding a motorcycle. After a year, they come back with a golden ring and some nice clothes. And after four or five years they come back with their first child. I find it very fulfilling to see that they want to come back and meet me and tell me they are living a good life."

50 years spent in achieving and enforcing a true Salesian ideal of education, while the Catholic world is celebrating the 150 th anniversary of St John Bosco's Salesians …what a coincidence!

A tribute to a great educator by the

on the occasion of