Almost Heaven, West Virginia

By K. P. Palmer ‘07

This fall break, I had the privilege of chaperoning the service trip to Bethlehem Farms in Summers County, West Virginia in central Appalachia. The farm, once a Catholic Worker House, provided social services to the people in the area, but closed in 2004. It reopened a few months later under the supervision of new owners, Eric Fitts and his wife Colleen, who had previously worked at Nazareth Farm in Illinois and were interested in opening a similar organization.

Bethlehem Farm thrives on four cornerstones of prayer, community, service, and simplicity. This sounds pretty serious, right? On the contrary, it is an extremely straightforward way to live. These cornerstones mean that the volunteers live together on a farm that is almost completely self-sustaining. They eat together, work together and pray together in the morning and before bed.

When the HCC group arrived, all of the caretakers came out of the house and greeted each one of us with a hug and said "welcome home" which seemed like a strange thing to say to a group of people who had just travelled over 400 miles.

On the first night of our trip, we met with other volunteers and were asked to share which cornerstone we were most excited about and which we were most nervous about. I was most excited about community. I chaperoned this trip with Amelia Marcum Ruggaber, ’02, and we were with eleven students who barely knew each other including Omar from Iraq and Guliver from Peru. There was also a group from Notre Dame at the farm with us that week, so, including the caretakers, there were close to forty people living together.

I was most nervous about living simply. When I told my friends in South Bend that I was going to volunteer on a farm in West Virginia, they laughed in my face. I am the kind of woman who enjoys dressing up, wearing make-up, and who generally shies away from manual labor. I was a little panicked about the likelihood of ruining my clothes at our work sites and of being allowed only two showers during my stay (to preserve water). I could not honestly say the last time I had weeded a garden, used a shovel, painted the outside of a building, or any activity that would involve getting dirty.

On this trip I did all of the above and even some chores I had never imagined in my wildest dreams like using power tools and cleaning guano out of a chicken coop.

To my surprise, it ended up being one of the most rewarding weeks of my life. Everyday had the same routine, yet was never mundane. We were woken by music being played loudly throughout the house, everything from Dave Matthews to Christian rock to Bruce Springsteen. We were given about thirty minutes worth of music to get up, dressed and ready for the day. We would then gather in the living room for morning prayer, and then headed out onto the farm where we did chores like weeding the garden and mowing the lawn until breakfast.

All of the meals were prepared completely from scratch and most, if not all, of the ingredients were grown on the farm. After breakfast, we split up into our crews and set off to our work sites. We would eat lunch at the site, usually with the people who lived there, and come back to the farm around 4:00 PM.

Bethlehem Farm serves its community by providing much more than physical labor. Every day we were sent to a different work site to help people who were in need, but we weren’t there to just paint or hammer or fix the plumbing. The caretakers at the farm encouraged us to form relationships with the people we were helping. It wasn’t our mission to ‘fix their problems’, but to make a relationship, to sit down with them and let them talk about their life or tell them about ours. For example, on our first work site, my crew visited an elderly widow who cannot get around on her own anymore. Technically, we were there to fix up the roofs of her house and two sheds on the property, but I ended up hanging out inside with her, washing her windows, vacuuming, and doing other little chores like that around her house that she was unable to do. We got to talking, and she was absolutely hilarious!

Another day my group visited a woman named Tracey to paint her house and build her a wheelchair ramp. My crew consisted of three women, including myself, and three men. We ladies painted the wood paneling of the house, which took up the entire morning. However, after lunch we were told that the men did not need help with the ramp they were building and so we went inside to spend time with Tracey, her daughter Tiffany, and Tiffany’s two young daughters. It was definitely the coldest day we experienced during the trip and were glad to be inside. We spent the afternoon playing with Tiffany’s children, watching Lifetime, and bonding over a shared love of David Duchovny.

Bethlehem Farms is much more than a ‘volunteer work camp’. It is a place where people have chosen to live simply, to rely on the Earth and their faith for their daily needs. Volunteers do not go there solely to provide service, they are welcomed into the fold and become a part of the mission. The genuine acceptance of complete strangers showed to us by our hosts was refreshing and inspirational. There was no end to the hugs throughout the week! We went to West Virginia expecting an opportunity for service and ended up getting the opportunity to experience another way of life. As we drove away from the farm on a small country road, I thought of the old John Denver song, "Country roads, take me home, to a place I belong, West Virginia…"