Anh Nguyen Austen

So a lot of that time I spent trying to ask about all the logistics and what had happened.

And then I was able to bring it back to researchers at the University of Melbourne who could do the

historical modeling of conditions of sea at the time and likelihood of survival.

Oh, well, they recall, you know, the waves being six meters tall.

You know, it would have looked like such a wall of water.

There was no way to tell.

And there was this kind of exhaustion of hope and, you know, a series of prayers.

There was just no sense that we would make it.

So...

When they saw the rescue ship on the horizon, they almost feared that it might be pirates coming to attack us.

I think they were getting more and more hopeless.

But it was quite miraculous that people came out to rescue us.

I don't remember seeing that boat, but I know that my father certainly remembers it.

And it was quite like to them, they recited, you know, like on the third day, there was this ship on the horizon, you know, and, you know, we had exhausted all the prayers to Mary and Joseph and everyone else.

Yeah, they were quite biblical.

And you'll find that kind of zealous Catholicism in that narrative amongst Vietnamese in diaspora.

Yeah, they were a fraction of Médecins Sans Frontières.

Basically, they were committed to kind of always being where the immediate needs and dangers were.

And so they kind of separated from Médecins Sans Frontières, which wanted to kind of establish more stable bases in order to help people.

So later, Médecins du Monde were kind of the doctors that wanted to go frontline.