1970 Voluntary Service

1970  Voluntary Service (VS). Support of Mennonites, creative leadership conference, Harrisonburg, Virginia; The Cost of Discipleship; Miller family visits: Roy R. and Berdella, Andrew and Mattie; a trip to Colombia; field trips and rainy days; job options and a visit to Scottdale, Pennsylvania; Puerto Rico voluntary service learnings and recommendations.

Mennonites support. I learned that during our Voluntary Service (VS) in Puerto Rico, from my first need for an agency to serve as a conscientious objector to war, it carried on to Mennonite Board of Missions providing orientation in Elkhart, Indiana, led by Walnut Creek native Jerry Miller and an oversized bear-type figure Ray Horst to our last day on the island, resources were provided. My relationship with the Mennonites was somewhat tenuous during my teen and university years, although most of it not by conscious design. We lived at the edge of the Amish Mennonite community at Holmesville and then came the marginal cultural religious mix of Maple Grove Mission. By my Malone years, I attended a Presbyterian church near campus on Sundays, although during the week I would help with the Mennonite Church’s Wednesday night boys’ club program called Torchbearer which was run by then pastor Willis Breckbill. But the Mennonite VS (I’m capping it because it was a formal program) took church membership seriously and asked for my certificates of church membership which sure enough I had from the newly formed Morehead Mennonite Church west of Holmesville. I only attended there for a short time after leaving Maple Grove Mission, but I well recall one Sunday during summer vacation when I happened to attend the day it was taking in charter members. I went up and signed on.

I mention all this because our voluntary service years can only be understood in the context of the Mennonite church. Mabel and Carlos Lugo had started the unit on that basis; our predecessors at Botijas were an elderly Mennonite pastoral couple, and much of our support was on that basis. The implicit part of the assignment was to nurture a church fellowship. Often a neighboring pastor Josian Rosario and missionary David Helmuth came and preached at our little fellowship, but soon by the second year with some Spanish language skills, it was simply assumed that I would take my turn at a sermon. We had a large Summer Bible School during school vacation and got strong personnel from the Puerto Rican Conference and financial support from the Berlin Mennonite Church. Regularly the Puerto Rican conference officials would stop in and contemplate when a building might be built to begin a Mennonite church in the barrio.  And our co-worker the nurse Marjorie Shantz was a long-term missionary-- in Puerto Rico since 1945. But toward the end of our term we noticed that she was leaving late at night for Orocovis and the nearest telephone. Sure enough, love was in the air, and by May of 1970, she got married to the Orrville, Ohio, merchant Phares Martin.  

The support was also in leadership formation in April of 1969, we were invited to a Voluntary Service leader conference at Harrisonburg, Virginia. Here we met with 30 other leaders in VS units spread across the USA and Puerto Rico. Many of these couples were leaders of large units which were attached to hospitals and nursing homes. Under the category of creative leadership, we were offered small group Bible study and lots of leadership and decision making games and processes, all a part of getting to know yourself. It all ended with the budding interpersonal meister David Augsburger speaking. For me the revealing moment was by the end of the week when we were all in a large room and everyone was asked to move chairs of individuals as to how close they were to the center of the group. Gloria was near the center, and they moved my chair to the edge. I blamed it on having had a cold and not attending many sessions, but it was also another inclination that I may have been a son of my father, the edge came naturally.

Economics and simplicity were also a part of the voluntary service, and trying to keep the unit expenses as low as possible; some were earning and some non-earning VS units, hence supporting each other based on what was sent or received from the central offices in Elkhart, Indiana. Our unit was officially a non-earning, but when Gloria and I were both teaching in the public schools, it became a de facto earning unit. Anyway, one of the couples of a large unit, I believe in Eureka, Illinois, reported how they carefully nudged the weekly food expenses down several cents a day, I believe to about 50 cents a day per person—by going strong on soups and macaroni and cheese casseroles. They considered it quite a stewardship achievement until the unit members revolted, unanimously sending a petition the central office at Elkhart, requested that the unit leaders be removed--at least in menu planning.          

The Mennonites also supported us theologically. At some point the Elkhart VS office suggested that we study as a unit The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1944). For several months, we did a weekly reading and discussion, and the book was memorable to me. It gave the language of Christian discipleship and cheap and costly grace. Much of this emphasis was inherent in our Amish and Mennonite upbringing, but I had never read it in quite this way by one who was a German theologian during the emergence of Hitler’s fascism and who had been influenced by a Harlem black church. It got us to thinking that VS should be more costly and that we should move out of the simple economy of the VS house and move into one of the little cement houses in the parceles; it raised questions of our relation to the Vietnam War.  I read on Bonhoeffer’s life and death, and in many ways, Bonhoeffer was my literary return to reading the Anabaptist theological and biblical books of my childhood. Years later, I recall Lawrence Burkholder noting that Bonhoeffer was a basic author at Goshen College in the fifties. Jesus said in Matthew 16:24 "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”

This support was all happening in the context of the polarizing and unpopular (especially with young people) war in Vietnam.  Others seemed to be taking such a costly stand, while I worked with a new wife in the tropical paradise of Puerto Rico, poor but still relatively comfortable. My Malone Quaker friend Phil DeVol had been drafted and entered the army, but then found that he could not kill, and I recall reading of his running away at the airport when he was about to be shipped to Vietnam. The Mennonite church press told of draft resisters who fled to Canada. My brother James, now at Central Christian High School, wrote me a long letter as he was about to turn 18. He was weighing his option not to register with the Selective Service office, as a sign of protest against the war.

I visited with the local Puerto Rican young men who had to go serve in the armed forces when they reached the age of 18. Their generally indirect question to me was how could I come down to their island country as a refuge for conscientious objectors, and they had to go off and fight what they considered a colonial war. The independentistas, those who wanted Puerto Rico to become an independent country, especially felt the injustice of this arrangement, believing that no Puerto Rican should be obliged to serve in the American army. Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship was a stimulating read on these dilemmas and issues.

Aside from the church, the family also supported us. During the Christmas holidays, Gloria’s family came to visit us, and we traveled around the island, visiting Aibonito, where Roy and Berdella were friends with Stanley and Fern Miller who had Berlin, Ohio, ties, Fern growing up there. Stanley had filled in for Roy for a few years as principal at the Berlin High School while Roy was away in Civilian Public Service. Eventually, the Millers landed in Puerto Rico, and by 1970 were big time producers in chickens and poultry around Aibonito as well as having green houses and raising flowers. Roy and Berdella were especially interested in their orchids, and we were fascinated by their family of adopted Puerto Rican children. 

We visited Aibonito where we found the Mennonite Hospital and the Luz y Verdad radio headquarters. Lester Hershey was the broadcasting chief (caudillo), and only later did I come to appreciate his total contribution to Hispanic Mennonites and also here in the Allegheny Conference where he retired. Many voluntary service workers worked at both the Mennonite broadcasts and the hospital, including the physician James Brubaker and the nurse Janet Christner Miller, who lived here in western Pennsylvania for many years. The hospital is probably the most influential Mennonite contribution to the island today, known throughout the Caribbean for its orthopedic specialty, and giving general care to the region with a second hospital in nearby Cayay and offices in smaller barrios nearby. Lawrence Greaser ran the hospital, and about 15 years ago when I visited the hospital, I met the executive director, a Sr. Torres who had grown up in Cañabón, which was a part of Botijas # 1 barrio.  From Aibonito, we traveled down to the southwestern part of the island and the Phosphorescent Bay. It was an enjoyable time of traveling and Roy adding to his sea shell collections.

Later that winter, or the rainy season in Puerto Rico, my parents Andrew and Mattie also came to visit us. How surprised we were because Andrew and Mattie had not traveled by air; Mattie later claiming that Andrew almost backed out at the airport. They stayed close to our barrio, and seemed to feel right at home. Mattie helped around the unit house and kitchen, and Andrew immediately visited the friendly neighbors, as though he were finding long-lost relatives. He would disappear for hours, and then I found him wandering in the parcelas from home to home, playing the guitar and drinking coffee. My father loved coffee, and it was traditional Puerto Rican hospitality to serve a drink to guests. Andrew knew no Spanish but the word coffee (café) seemed to translate okay, as did the guitar. The keys of G, D and A were common whether the song was Spanish or English. For weeks afterwards, people from the barrio would tell me of a visit from my father. A year later, when we got home, we discovered that Andrew had learned the benediction blessing, Quedete, Señor, (Stay with us, Lord). He sang it at every opportunity.     

The Mennonites supported in travel. In January 1970 we visited Colombia for a two-week vacation; this was in part a return of Gloria to Cali and a country where she had spent the summer of 1965 with the Luis Acuña family. It was also an opportunity for us to check out whether we might live there for the next two years with Gloria studying at a university and completing her Spanish degree. It was also visiting in Bogotá with Glendon and Reitha Klaassen, Mennonite missionaries located in that city. We arrived early on Sunday morning and Klassen picked us up at the airport and drove us to a round church building which looked like an umbrella. The church was impressive because of its size and architectural modernity.  Around Bogota, we visited sites such as the gold museum of pre-Hispanic indigenous art and the salt cathedral of Zipaquira. 

The next week we took off for cross-country by bus travel by heading up in the mountains to the coffee town of Manizales. Here we became regular tourists for their festival of the patron saint (I don’t recall which one) which featured bullfighting. One afternoon (January 9, 1970) we went to see the torero Manuel Benítez, El Cordobés of Spain, who was awarded one ear by the president—even though the crowd shouted and whistled for two ears. I had read a number of Hemmingway’s Spain books so the sport or spectacle was fascinating. But equally memorable were the night sounds at our guest house. A neighborhood cat was in heat, and the toms howled all night long, interrupted on the hour it seemed by the innkeeper shouting at them.  I have never heard cats howl so loudly and musically before or since. When we returned to Bogotá, we stayed at the Klaassens who were excellent hosts, and one night they got out their Rook cards, playing with us until late in the night.

In many ways we went native in Puerto Rico, or at least tried to, largely staying away from what we considered the more Americanized contexts of San Juan and Aibonito (because of the  voluntary service and mission personnel). But if there was great beauty in the isolated Botijas # 1 barrio, I also wanted the children to be bi-cultural of knowing there were other options, so we took lots of fieldtrips during school vacation in our VW van, usually under the auspices of our 4-H club. We went to the zoo in Mayaguez and visited with Carlos Lugo who was now teaching science there. One day we went to tour a TV station in San Juan, and another time we toured the Commonwealth Oil Refining Company (CORCO) near Ponce. Other times a group visited the Parks and Recreation Department in San Juan (seeking sports equipment). Maybe the field trips were an extension of my earlier St. Louis summer days, but I think it was also a part of my ambivalence regarding the beauty and limitations of a closed pre-modern community such as Botijas or in many ways my own Amish childhood. One respects such a community, but also wants to give youths the opportunity to accept it or to choose another option.

If Botijas was fairly isolated, it was extremely open in regards to children and adults coming and going into each others houses; there was little privacy until the sun went down and everyone went home. The one exception which I remember was in the rainy season of January, February and March when it sometimes rained for days or even a week. If it flooded and washed out some roads, so much the better for us. Schools were closed; we could be alone for days and read Oscar Lewis’ culture of poverty books, such as La Vida on the La Perla section of Puerto Rico. I remember reading some of John Updike’s early Pennsylvania books, such as Rabbit Run and the short story “Pigeon Feathers.” In the background an old stereo played 33 long-play records of Beethoven’s nine symphonies, and the rain drops pinged on the tin roof.  Gloria was also a reader or sometimes would do large puzzles on the table. It was cherished isolation. 

A job was always important to me and during the year I carried on correspondence with Victor Dix who was keeping me abreast of openings and goings on at The Daily Record. The same was true of Everett Cattell at Malone College. The opportunities seemed limitless; we checked out going to Australia which was seeking young people to come and live there, and I had earlier mentioned Colombia. That Fall recruiters from the New York and Chicago city schools (with burgeoning Hispanic populations) came to San Juan looking for bilingual teachers, and we had opportunities there. Closer to home in Puerto Rico, the Mennonite academy in San Juan (Summit Hills), invited me to become the principal of their school, and Gloria could finish her studies in Spanish at the University of Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras.

Then out of the blue, or so it seemed, came a letter from Mennonite Publishing House inviting us to check out a editorial position, even inviting us to come to Scottdale, Pennsylvania, for an interview. I mention these options not because I was so employable but because the times seemed so open; the United States was an expanding economy and opportunities seemed limitless for everyone. But a job also seemed important to me; I had a $3,000 debt after leaving college, and sometimes I would wake up at night my muscles literally jerking in fear that we could not pay it off soon enough and have financial independence. Maybe, it was also the old Levi L. Schlabach Swiss German work ethic.

In October, Paul M. Lederach met us at the Pittsburgh Airport, and drove us on the old Route 51 south until the borough of Smithton and then on through the winding hills to Scottdale and Mennonite Publishing House. He proudly showed us the large new Chrysler plant which was coming to the area and we met some of the key leaders of Mennonite Publishing House, having dinner with personnel manager Nelson Waybill and publisher Ben Cutrell at Miedels Restaurant near Connellsville. Even though the job was in Lederach’s newly formed curriculum division, and I had no special expertise in this area, Lederach let me know by the end of the day that they would offer me a job. We spent the night at Anna Brilhart’s house, and the next morning my parents Andrew and Mattie came and drove us up to our families in Ohio on the old US Route 30, winding up through East Liverpool and familiar Canton and then home to Holmes County. For both my father and my mother our move all seemed natural, they simply assumed that we had already made the decision to move to Scottdale. I, of course, did not know to what extent I was living out my father’s dreams (1948).  

Mennonite support had limits however, especially in regards to my counsel on leaving VS. When we were leaving Puerto Rico, one final act was to write an evaluation of the experience. We had gained so much in learning how Puerto Ricans made their neighborhoods friendly livable communities, helped each other, educated their children, governed themselves, worshipped, and enjoyed their fiestas. We learned the joys and pains of Puerto Ricans by at least trying to go native, in some awkward way to be sure, in rural Puerto Rico. That identification may also have been part of the service. Gloria said that one of the positive learnings for her was the additional meanings of family, especially the Puerto Rican sense of extended family. We were positive regarding believing we may have contributed to what we called cultural enrichment. The young people with whom we worked could experience other ways of doing things, whether in education (English), music (piano), foods (baking), or our inherited religious beliefs (Mennonite).

My conclusion was that that the Voluntary Service unit (of North American young Mennonites) actually subtracted from the Christian witness, service contribution, and cultural immersion. I advocated dismantling the VS unit and having VS people as individuals or family units living in little cement houses in las parcelas, same as the local folks. I felt that the VS emphasis on community and unit group building was detrimental to identification with the local community. The voluntary service directors commended us on our service and reports, but they probably wisely ignored my extreme recommendation in dismantling the communal VS unit. Voluntary service probably worked best by both taking care of the communal needs of young North Americans as well as immersing them into the cultural matrix of Puerto Rican life. Little did I know that I would be returning to an American society where community and small groups would be all the rage, but that is a story for the next decade. 

Most of this is based on correspondence and reports in my personal files and photos of the Puerto Rico years. In 1971-1972 I wrote an unpublished fiction work called “Ramon’s Friend,” based on our two years of Voluntary Service at Botijas # 1 in Puerto Rico.