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Name: Montree Ngamwong
Date of birth: April 30, 1979
Hobbies and interests: cooking, watching movies, reading
Favorite saints: the Seven Martyrs of Thailand
I was born into a rice farmer's family in a village named Nong Khu which is a Catholic village in the west of Thailand. Both my parents worked hard on our land to grow rice, some vegetables, fruit and raise water buffaloes. I have a younger brother and sister. I attended Holy Family school in Nong Khu for grades one through six. After I graduated from elementary school, I went to the St. Joseph Upathum junior seminary in Sampran for grades seven through twelve. During my time in the junior seminary, we went out to pray in the houses of those who had died since we had many Catholic families around us and they invited us to go and pray for their dead. During Advent and Christmas, the seminarians divided into small groups and went out to sing Christmas songs, and pray with the people who lived around the seminary. After I graduated from the junior seminary, my friends and I were postulants and we went to the north of Thailand. This area is the responsibility of Betharram which takes care of the mountain people. They live in remote areas and some places can't be reached by car, and naturally many people had no electricity. They are the minority and there are many clans such as A-Kha, Karean etc.
I stayed with the A-Kha people for one year. While I was there I taught them to speak and read in Thai while I studied their language. I stayed there nine months and then returned to Sampran to be a novice. While as a novice I learned a lot about the spiritual life of Betharram but did not complete my time and left the novitiate. I went to teach at Mary Withaya School in the Srisaket province which is in the northeast of Thailand. I was the English teacher and taught grades three and four. I stayed there for about a year. Then I decided to further my education and entered St. John University in Bangkok and majored in computer information management (CIM). During my studies, I always kept in touch with Fr. O'Malley to seek his advice when problems occurred. After I graduated from St. John's University I began to teach there. My responsibilities included taking care of the all the network equipment and teaching networking and Microsoft Power Point.
My desire to become a priest began when I was in junior high school in my Catholic village in eastern Thailand. I went to church almost daily for mass and prayer. French missionary priest brought Catholicism to the village about 100 years ago and the people still have good memories of those first priest. Now there are Thai priest and even a Thai bishop. My discernment of the call to priesthood in the Diocese of Oakland has been helped by the policy that the Diocese of Oakland accepts more mature candidates unlike in Thailand were they prefer very young candidtates. I would be happy to live and serve as a priest in the Diocese of Oakland. I pray that God is calling me there.