Searching for Peace

Jay Hersch (PCV Colombia 1965-66)

During my senior year at the University of Wisconsin, I was accepted at Northwestern Law School and the University of Wisconsin’s Ph.D. program in the School of Agronomy. Competing with the academic option was Peace Corps, the brilliant idea of Hubert Humphrey, who wrote the legislation, and President Kennedy, who championed the idea.

In 1963, JFK was gunned down in Dallas, and this in many ways tilted the decision for taking the Peace Corps path. I remember coming out of classes from Besom Hall. It was a cool afternoon on November 22. As we got out on the quad in front of the statue of Abraham Lincoln, a whispering conspiracy, like a viral attack, spread to each of us.

I ran down the hill to verify that this crazy rumor was true. I needed to see the breaking news on TV. This, in retrospect, was only the beginning of the tragedies of the Sixties—all of which would have a profound effect on the politics of America and on our individual challenge to cope with a time of uncontrollable change.

An advanced degree would wait. The allure of helping people—the altruistic American impulse —guided me and hundreds of other graduating students to choose this new option. I did not know what to expect because my group was only the second one to be trained in Cooperatives development for Colombia. We arrived in April 1965 and I was assigned to Cajamarca, a rural community about 100 miles south of Bogotá. It was here, among the campesinos who farmed the steep slopes of the central cordillera of the Andean Mountains, that I became acquainted with the psychological and sociological factors that kept these have-nots in their place and apart from larger economic prospects for advancement.

In 1958, the Colombian civil war, or la violencia, ended. From then until 1964, a vestige of the violencia manifested itself in the bandoleros (bandits), who refused to become integrated into the generally pacified country. Although they had been physically eliminated from Cajamarca, I found that their residual presence had tainted the idea of cooperation for mutual benefit. They were highly suspicious of their neighbors and very cynical of anything sponsored by the government, which was no different than the oligarchy, whether they professed to be Liberal or Conservative. Both parties had used the campesinos as pawns and proxies to fight the civil war. In this climate of communal mistrust, I was expected to develop agricultural cooperatives with a membership comprised largely of campesinos, whose class consciousness was expressed by mass apathy and indifference. My presence was seen as just another in a long series of unfulfilled promises. Their combination of suspicion and mistrust proved to be a powerful obstacle. I was able to get one cooperative off the ground, but it could not be sustained for long; the lack of commitment to the concept of mutual cooperation was fatal.

I didn’t know then that this experience in Colombia would be echoed in my professional life in the U.S. In the War on Poverty, we encountered similar attitudes of apathy and indifference toward the promises of our government to help the poor of Georgia and Alabama.

Peace Corps in America

I completed graduate school at Johns Hopkins in 1968 and began my search for a Peace Corps counterpart in America. This decision came at the time my generation was consumed in the moral dilemma of our involvement in Vietnam. Fortunately, I had a choice between business and government. I opted for the latter because of the War on Poverty. There seemed to be an inalienable link between my previous experience in community action and the program that President Lyndon B. Johnson launched. The Peace Corps was about enfranchising the poor—and this was what Saul Alinsky had addressed in his book Rules for Radicals.

I ended up at the Office of Economic Opportunity—a key element of the War on Poverty. The concepts of change we promoted with Peace Corps were being applied domestically in the Job Corps, Head Start, Community Economic Development, and Vista. The younger generation was shaking up the stodgy old bureaucracies of the Departments of Labor, Commerce, and Health, Education and Welfare.

The lessons learned in a foreign setting were equally applicable to our domestic environment. Grassroots organizations in Colombia were called acción comunal. In the U.S. it was agencies of Community Action. I got a job with the Office of Community Economic Development at OEO, in an agrarian reform program on 600 acres of land in Georgia’s rural Lee County, an assignment barely different than my work with Colombian campesinos.

Still, I had a nagging nostalgia for the beauty of Colombia’s rural countryside and it drove me to explore new surroundings. My wife and I first looked at West Virginia; then western Maryland; and finally at Virginia. On one weekend search in 1972, we made a fateful trip, crossing over Shenandoah Mountain and into Virginia’s Highland County. Virginia is a unique state. It has topographical and geological areas: ocean, bay and estuaries, piedmont, the rolling hill country; the great Shenandoah Valley—and most important to me, the mountains.

We were hooked. The most mountainous county in the eastern U.S. was a re-embodiment of Colombia. We were to replace the agricultural farming of Colombia with grazing of cattle and sheep in Virginia. In 1972, we bought our first farm of 134 acres; and in 1980 the second one. Cooperative development led to corporate enterprise. The raising of a new breed of cattle, beefalo, evolved into a marketing company that focused on a healthy meat alterative.

It was serendipity. From the Peace Corps experience organizing farmers’ cooperatives; from graduate school in economic development to homesteading a farm on weekends, and creating a new business venture—all are interconnected at a junction of the past and present. The flow of ideas from these farms has provided me a font of ideas and spiritual uplift for a lifetime. They embrace conservation and preservation of a simpler life that is grounded in the rhythms of nature, a spiritual asylum for taking a measure of one’s life, bringing into clearer focus what we want to become in our generation and bequeath to future ones. They force us to look at the journey taken and what we want to leave as a legacy to our families and nation. And they help us devise the compass for our lives’ directions.

Near to the farms where I had transplanted my enduring Peace Corps values lies a cemetery at a spot chosen by those who came before me. It has a long view of the Shenandoah mountains. For an enchanted moment, our forebears must have believed that beyond the mountains were alluring Elysian fields of paradise, so close to a place of aching beauty that God could have deemed it his own.