EDITORIAL
No Room for Bleeding Hearts
WHEN YOU JOIN VISTA, you join the Volunteer corps and perhaps the most demanding part of the war on poverty. Your fighting is done at the grass roots level and there's little that's theoretical about it. VISTA Volunteers live with poverty. They learn its taste, its sound, its feel. They do whatever they can to end the misery it creates.
Almost 5,000 Volunteers In Service To America have served now. Three-fourths of them are college trained. Their fight against poverty goes on daily in city slums, back in Appalachian hollows, on Indian reservations, in Job Corps Centers, in migrant farm worker camps, and in institutions that care for the mentally ill and retarded. You can find VISTA Volunteers from Alaska to Puerto Rico; from Harlem to Honolulu.
Unfortunately, there's no shortage of poverty in this nation. There's more than enough to go around, and six weeks prior to being assigned to the poverty pocket where they will spend the next year of their lives, Volunteers are steeped in its cause and culture at universities, or by social action agencies which specialize in the problems of the chronically poor.
VISTA Volunteers never go to a community unless they are specifically invited. At present, there are invitations out for some 13,000 Volunteers. Once they are assigned, they do what is needed for those in need. This is the most demanding and important job they have ever had. It demands more responsibility of them than some will ever have again.
Some Volunteers organize community action groups where none existed before. Sometimes they teach the poor and their children through Head Start programs. Sometimes they counsel them on the daily problem of getting enough food to eat and a place to sleep. They guide the sick to existing health services. They help the jobless find employment. They talk dropouts into giving school one more chance. Perhaps more important, they enlist the help of the community itself to solve its own problems. They serve as the catalysts of the poor who want to escape the poverty trap.
They do this for an entire year and for their efforts they receive $50 a month (which is banked for them until they leave VISTA), a bare, rockbottom subsistence allowance and free medical and dental care. Many re-enlist for another year.
VISTA is looking for Volunteers who are both compassionate and tough enough to take the heartbreak and frustration that are poverty's twin companions.
A year in VISTA doesn't provide good cocktail party conversations, and it won't furnish transfusions for bleeding hearts. But if you want to take the next year of your life for credit, and think you can take the heat, VISTA would like to hear from you.
There's a handy form on the back page.
Waring Fincke is living in the 3rd Ward, in Houston, Texas, tutoring area residents and working in community organization.
Volunteers Describe VISTA Experience
Many of the 873 VISTAs working on rural assignments are living in Appalachia. Instead of covering a block, they tramp from hollow to hollow, forming a link between scattered families, setting up pre-school programs, encouraging a community to talk about—and act on—its problems.
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The largest part of VISTA's Volunteer corps are young men and women who have elected to trade the comfort of the college campus for areas where the buildings are more likely to be tenements or rural shacks. The thirteen Volunteers quoted here tell what the experience has meant to them.
Lawrence Gossett, University of Washington; assigned to the Lower East Side Information and Service Center for Narcotics Addiction in New York City: "I worked my way through three years of college, where I learned more tolerance for people. Being a Negro, I understand the problems of slum ghetto life and what it means to reject dignity, pride and initiative as useless. That's why I joined VISTA."
Steve McCurrach, assigned to Fonde, Kentucky, during the VISTA Associates' summer program in Appalachia: "A lot of us bring big-city reality with us when we come into the hills. But maybe there are ways of seeing things that are truer here than we know. There's time to develop real relationships. You don't seem to have that time or that chance in other places. And that doesn't have a thing to do with money. Or poverty."
Charles Breitweiser, San Jose City College, California; serving with his wife, Elaine, on the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Indian Reservation in Belcourt, North Dakota: "We have outside plumbing. I bought a plastic garbage can and punched holes in it for spigots. I fill it every couple of days. I've already gotten used to
it. I mean, what the hell, there's nothing to do but adapt. I teach in the reservation's elementary school system. But it's not just a matter of teaching. It's being emotionally involved. Before I could go weeks without getting excited about my work. Here it happens every day."
Catherine T. McKee, George Washington University, Washington, D.C.; assigned to St. Thomas, Virgin Islands: "Living among the people on a low-wage scale makes it easier to understand their difficulties and their feelings. Working with the people in poverty is extremely exasperating part of the time and extremely rewarding most of the time."
Bill Grunloh, Macalester College, Minnesota; assigned to Project Up-stream, which followed the migrant workers from Florida to New Jersey: "I want to leave behind just one thing that a VISTA Volunteer has done. Maybe the people in the community will remember it and begin to get involved in what's going on around them. The problem isn't just the migrants who come and go. It's also those who stay behind."
Richard Gibboney, Georgetown University, assigned to Spring Grove State Hospital in Cantonsville, Md., where he is attempting to help patients re-establish contact with the world through the use of poetry and drama: "Many of the poets and dramatists write of extreme situations and the patients respond to this. When I began working with one group of women, they'd just stare at the wall. They wouldn't
even talk to people. Next week they're giving a reading for 60 fellow patients. But I don't want to minimize the problems involved. We live and eat on the grounds and many people can't take it. There's a great deal of strain in a situation like this."
Hallock Beals, University of Kentucky; assigned to the village of Kipnuk in Alaska: "The problems here are so complex, so culturally oriented that there are no sure solutions. Eventually, the Eskimo of Kipnuk will come into the American culture. It may take several generations, but it will come. We're trying to take the first step—helping them realize what opportunities are available today."
Jane Henderson, Henry Ford Community College, Michigan; serving in Moultree, Georgia: "When we first came, we were kind of threatened. There was a man who came to us and said he'd heard that if we worked in the integrated center, we'd find a cross burning on our lawn. We were frightened because we didn't know if it was just a threat. But the threat never really materialized. A lot of the suspicion has died down now."
Richard Linus Preston, College of the Pacific, California; working with the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre Indian Tribes in Lodge Pole, Montana: "The first thing I asked when I got here was, 'What can I learn from you?' They said, 'Not much.' But I have learned. You can't pressure people to accept your ideas. You keep them to yourself so people can
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