Love Can Change People

I am talking with Ron and Pat Boese about the years they spent doing voluntary service with Mennonite Central Committee in two different locations in the 1970s. Their first assignment was in Kentucky in Mammoth Cave National Park where they worked at the Great Onyx Job Corps Centre. It was run by the United States Government. Young men who were in trouble with the law were sent to the centre to work and receive a second chance at life by learning a trade like cooking, carpentry or mechanics. READ MORE

Pat did secretarial work in the medical clinic as well as for two of the Job Corps Centre counsellors. Ron ran the tool shop and was in charge of the grass cutting crew. Some 200 young men between the ages of 16-18, from a variety of southern states lived in trailer dormitories on the site. Many were school dropouts who came from low-income families.

In Kentucky some of Ron and Pat’s colleagues were government workers and they have fond memories of the relationships they built with them as well as the young men who were staying at the site. They appreciated the way their Kentucky experience taught them to be much more open and understanding as they interacted with people of so many different family backgrounds, religions, races and classes of society. While working in Kentucky they attended a Presbyterian Church where the congregation really embraced them and supported them.

Ron and Pat’s second two-year MCC term was in a residential work program for young men on a farm near Warburg, Alberta. The goal of the Youth Orientation Unit was to have farm life help troubled young men between the ages of 16-20 learn practical work skills and habits and to develop new ways to creatively deal with their problems. Six teenagers who had serious life challenges were housed in the upper storey of a log house on the farm. Pat and Ron lived on the main floor and acted as their house parents.

Pat did all the grocery shopping, meal planning and cooking and Ron worked with the boys in the barns caring for the cows, chickens and horses. They built meaningful relationships with the teenagers in their care and kept in touch with some of them even after their service term was over. When one of the young men they had worked with ended up in prison near Winnipeg some years later, they went to visit him and took him into their home for six months after he was released.

When I ask Ron and Pat what their voluntary service with MCC both in Kentucky and Alberta taught them they tell me about the challenging backgrounds of the young men they worked with in both places. Many had experienced neglect, dysfunction, poverty and physical violence. “We learned that love could change them,” they tell me. “Love changes people.”

Pat and Ron would eventually both work at Canadian Mennonite University for decades, Ron as the head of maintenance and Pat in the library.  As they had done during their MCC terms they were once again serving at a place where young adults were learning and maturing and finding their way in life.

- MaryLou Driedger