wfn.org | MVS unit lives on in community

[BethAH@mbm.org]

March 14, 2001
Beth Hawn
Mennonite Board of Missions
(219) 294-7523
<NEWS@MBM.org>

Mashulaville MVS unit lives on in community, lives of volunteers

Grant Rissler is serving through Mennonite Voluntary Service as a
writer and photographer.  After spending a year as intern at the
Mennonite Central Committee United Nations office in Manhattan,
he is traveling for five months by bus to 20 other MVS and
Short-Term Mission sites, gathering the stories and experiences
of other volunteers and communities.  A weekly column by Grant
can be found on the web at www.MBM.org.

MASHULAVILLE, Miss. (MBM) – Old Voluntary Service units don’t
die. They don’t even fade away.  Instead, say people connected to
the 18-year history of the unit that operated here from 1978 to
1996, the unit continues on in the lives of the community and the
volunteers.

Over a period of 18 years, nearly 80 young people, mostly from
traditional Mennonite areas, came to this small, 70 percent
African-American rural community just off Highway 14 in eastern
Mississippi.  Close to a dozen of them still live in either
Mashulaville or Meridian, a small city an hour to the south.  All
of them credit VS with bringing them to where they find
themselves in life.

“To me it’s impressive how many seeds that unit has planted, how
many of those unit members now live in Mississippi,” said Melody
Clymer, who served as an elementary schoolteacher in VS from
1989-1991.  Following her two years in voluntary service, she
stayed in the community for two years with her husband and fellow
VSer, Mike, who is a high school mathematics teacher.  “For us,
it was a formative experience, a foundation for the rest of the
things we’ve done.”

Being involved in racial and economic issues as part of a
community is important to the Clymers, according to Mike.  “And
that’s really due to our involvement in VS,” he said.  “Wherever
we’ve gone, it’s been important to find that community, to deal
with those issues.”

That pull has taken Mike and Melody on an interesting journey: to
Swaziland with Mennonite Central Committee; back to Melody’s home
area of Harrisonburg, Va., where Mike studied conflict
transformation at Eastern Mennonite University; and finally to
Meridian where they are both active members of Jubilee Mennonite
Church.

“Part of it is selfish for me,” Mike said.  “I feel a lot more
alive and enriched in this type of setting than I would in [a
traditional Mennonite area].  I think living in Mashulaville was
the first time I’d felt like that.”

For Howie Schiedel, who served in VS from 1981-1984, his years as
a carpenter, helping low-income families build small additions
onto their homes through zero-interest loans, can be seen as a
major strand of the web Christ has woven in his life.

“While I was in VS, my father turned over the family construction
business to my two brothers” said Schiedel, who now teaches
carpentry at a community college in Meridian.  “I had a five-year
opportunity to become a partner.  I let that lapse.  I credit
voluntary service with helping me make the decision that God was
calling me to.  It wasn’t as lucrative a decision …  but if you
have 10 people carrying a log and nine are on one end and one is
on the other, which end do you go help?”

Many of the volunteers speak of how the people they met while
serving in Mashulaville continue to be an inspiration for them.

“A lot of the older rural black folks who really weren’t that far
removed from slavery … their spirit, their character, generosity,
sense of history was just amazing,” Mike Clymer said. “When
you’re in that community serving, you feel like you’re a part of
something important, something meaningful.  Teaching their
grandchildren wasn’t easy, but they were an inspiration.”

One of the things that made the unit special for Mary Bucher was
“a sense of history passed on from someone that had been here for
awhile.

“The older community members and unit members would tell us
stories about what happened before,” said Bucher, who served from
1980-1983 and continues to live and work in Mashulaville as a
midwife.  “And you could understand where people were coming
from.  It was a way to bridge the gap in memory, to understand
why people are the way they are.”

Their presence as volunteers often changed some of the harsh
realities that made up the memories of the black community.

“Before the VS unit came,” said Larry Miller, a local Mennonite
who was part of the local pool of support for the unit, “the
house was a private agricultural school for white children, kind
of an education in how to run a plantation.  The blacks had
always had to come in the back door, or wait for someone to come
out.  For older black people, it was really special [to visit the
unit] because they could come in the front door.

“Though we were not politically involved,” Miller continued, “I
remember a discussion in a small church on school integration.
People were asking ‘How can we expect anything to change?’ and
one old black man stood up and said, ‘When I look back there [and
see the white VSers with us], well, I never thought I’d see
this.  Because there are whites here with us, we should try [to
push for integration].’”

The VS unit created jobs and empowered people, Miller said,
pointing out also that the VSers had begun monitoring the water
systems and acting as an ad hoc fire department.  When the VSers
left, Miller said, the community wanted to keep those services,
so people within the community took up the responsibilities.

That impact has continued, both in Mashulaville and in Meridian,
where six former unit members are part of Jubilee Mennonite
Church.

“I think my sense of who God is and his caring was something I
learned more about in VS.  I think we bring all those things, and
the relating to the community, to Jubilee,” said Dianna Schiedel,
now a school counselor at Oakland Heights Elementary School in
Meridian.  Dianna served from 1982-1984 and is married to Howie.
“The people who have come through VS just really plug into
church.  They’re involved and they incorporate that into their
church lives.  They have a keen interest in reaching out to other
people.”

Despite all the good the unit has done, many of the needs that
brought a VS unit to Mashulaville are still present.

“That was 10 years ago that we were in VS,” Mike Clymer said.
“There were lives that were clearly touched, and that is
inspiring.  But the poverty remains as well, and you can see the
destructive cycle repeat itself and so you ask yourself, ‘What
difference did that unit really make?  Would there have been more
sad stories without the VS unit?’  I don’t know.  But there are
students that I taught that when I see them, they’re doing well
and I feel good about that.”

The Mashulaville unit was closed Aug. 1, 1996.  Increasingly,
volunteers were interested in going to urban environments instead
of a very small rural community.  After renting the unit house
for several years, Larry  and Maxine bought it.  They are now
pondering ways to use the house as a continuing outreach.

* * *

Grant E. Rissler       PHOTO AVAILABLE