This Daughter of Charity is marking 25 years of service this year—a journey that’s taken her from Vietnam to hospitals in San Jose, up to Alaska (where yes, she really did catch that massive fish in the photo), and now to Santa Barbara’s Fr. Virgil Cordano Center (FVCC), where she’s become something of a local legend with a pair of clippers.

Twenty-five years is a long time to serve, and Sister Oanh hasn’t exactly been sitting still. She arrived in the US, and like many Vietnamese immigrants,  secured her beautician license. Then after joining the Daughters of Charity congregation, she went on to get her LVN, RN, and just this year, her BSN. Most people would pick one lane and stay there. Sister Oanh uses all the lanes. “I just want to help people,” she says simply, which is the kind of thing that sounds like a platitude until you watch her actually do it.

These days, she’s splits her time between the Fr. Virgil Cordano Center — giving haircuts to nearly 30 each week to people experiencing homelessness – and Villa Caridad senior apartments on the St. Vincent’s Santa Barbara campus — where she offers wellness checks, along with her ear to listen and her heart to pray.  This Center is Santa Barbara’s only day-time drop in center, and when Sister Oanh sets up her tools around her generously donated barber chair, members show up because they know they are seen.  “They are all children of God. They don’t have anything, but a haircut gives them confidence. I want to help them know that someone loves them and cares for them.”

Here’s the thing about the Daughters of Charity that makes a calling different than a regular career: this is not about making a living, it’s about serving where you’re needed.  Hospital nursing pays well. Cosmetology is steady work. But being comfortable isn’t the point. Alaska certainly wasn’t comfortable—though she’ll tell you the fishing was excellent and she will share photographic evidence of a fish that looks like it fought back.

The combination of skills isn’t random. Haircuts aren’t just haircuts when you’re living on the streets. They’re dignity; sometimes even a better chance at a job interview.  And when that haircut comes at the hands of someone who’s also a nurse and a nun? Someone who understands trauma and resilience and the thousand small ways the body and spirit wear down? That’s not just service. That’s wholeness.

“Everyone wants to look their best,” Sister Oanh says. “A shampoo and haircut makes them feel better and more confident. And happier.”

After 25 years—San Jose hospitals, Alaskan winters, now Santa Barbara’s streets—she’s still showing up with the same question the Daughters of Charity have been asking since 1858: What does this community need most?  Right now, in Santa Barbara, it’s a chair, some clippers, and someone who remembers that every person in it is worth seeing. 

Happy 25 years, Sister Oanh. Keep catching fish and changing lives.