wfn.org | Service, simplicity and the UN

[BethAH@mbm.org]

January 3, 2001
Beth Hawn
Communications Coordinator
Mennonite Board of Missions
phone (219) 294-7523
fax (219) 294-8669
<www.MBM.org>
January 3, 2001

MVSer speaks about service, simplicity and the United Nations

ELKHART, Ind. (MBM/CHM) – Grant Rissler, an itinerant volunteer
writer/photographer for Mennonite Voluntary Service, admits that
he sometimes gets confused about where he is.

“For five months, I won’t spend more than a week in any one
place,” Rissler says.  “When I tell people what I’m doing right
now, either they say they’re jealous or they say I’m crazy.”

After spending a year as a volunteer associate at the Mennonite
Central Committee United Nations office in Manhattan, Rissler is
traveling by bus to 20 other MVS and short-term mission sites in
Canada and the United States, gathering the stories and
experiences of other volunteers and communities.

“Living as an MVSer in Manhattan, I learned a great deal about
service, about community, about living simply in the financial
capital of the world,” he said.  “This journey is a wonderful
opportunity to gather the lessons others have learned, and to
share them with the larger church.”

In New York, Rissler worked to bring the concerns of MCC workers
and Mennonites in Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo,
Iraq, Somalia and the Ukraine to the attention of diplomats and
Secretariat workers in the United Nations system.   He also
attended United Nations conferences such as the Millennium Summit
of Religious and Spiritual Leaders on behalf of MCC and
Mennonites in general.

“The position was a truly unique opportunity,” Rissler says.  “In
the same day I would be answering an e-mail from our country
representative in Somalia and attending a briefing by the
president of the Security Council on the situation in East
Timor.  The breadth of issues and the evidence of ongoing need
facing the UN is sobering.”

Rissler was born in Kenya and later spent two years in Somalia
with his parents, who were mission workers for Eastern Mennonite
Missions.  A Virginian for most of his childhood, Rissler
graduated from Goshen (Ind.) College with a bachelor’s degree in
history, writing his senior thesis on MCC’s first relief effort
to the Soviet Union from 1921-1926.  He also studied in the
Dominican Republic through Goshen College’s Study Service Term
program, and in Colombia through the Programa de Conciencizacion
de Norte Americanos.

A weekly column by Rissler can be found on the web at
www.MBM.org.

MVS is a program of the Commission on Home Ministries and MBM.
MVS maintains an official web site at www.mennonitevs.org.

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MBM Staff        PHOTO AVAILABLE