Walking the Walk

Encounters with Jubilee Partners, Part 1

originally published May 7, 2008

Jubilee Partners is a religious community in Madison County whose mission is to fulfill the moral teachings of Jesus through social activism. This has been their project for 30 years, harboring political refugees on a 260-acre woodland estate set aside for just that purpose. Over the years, Jubilee has sponsored thousands of people. It is no exaggeration to say that many of them would have met certain death had they been returned to their home countries. And before their arrival, many had experienced conditions and circumstances such as refugee camps and torture chambers, acquiring experiences far more foreign to readers than the lands they had fled.

Jubilee Partners has a sister project, Koinonia, in Americus, GA. Don Mosley and others have nurtured both of these programs, as well as being among the principle founders of Habitat for Humanity, the world-renowned organization that addresses the housing needs of poor people everywhere. Former President Jimmy Carter, whose hometown of Plains is not far from Americus and Koinonia, has assumed an important role as a board member of Habitat, and has taken an active interest in Jubilee as well.

This article is the attempt of an outsider to enter this world and bring a part of it to light for the people of Athens. Though it’s only 15 miles from downtown, a very few locals have ever heard of it.

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Highway 22, heading into Comer from Oglethorpe County. The sign had intrigued me for years, yet I had not thought to turn down that dirt road, fearing an encounter with one more fundamentalist clique tucked away in the Northeast Georgia landscape. Madison County is not generally thought of as a refugee destination.

My mind had mulled over the word “Jubilee,” an old-fashioned term I had dimly associated with my childhood. The kind of jubilee I had envisioned for such a place more resembled a Salvation Army marching band, staid yet high-stepping out in front of a ragtag band of press-ganged worshippers - no intimation of poised, intelligent, charitable folk toiling in wooded serenity. And no thought of refugees from across the world’s war zones…

An acquaintance of mine, no friend to religious extremism, tipped me off. My fears were unfounded. “They’re cool people; you should check them out.”

The road leading up to the main buildings of Jubilee Partners is a straight shot back from Highway 22 about a half-mile. In that short distance, one is transported to a world only hinted at by the dense tree lines that wrap these rural drives. Entering the land for the first time, I was revisited by the boyhood thought that somehow, improbably, nature can still make a stand.

Pulling into a graveled parking area, I set out in search of folks. I crossed a small catwalk, looking in through a window to find a medium-sized dining hall. The room was empty. In front was an enclosed counter, obviously a serving area. Great stainless steel pots shone upon black burners. Still, no people. Outside the dining hall was a series of doors. I opened one. In a closet-sized work area, a diminutive, elderly woman stood, leaning into her work (which I later learned was grinding grain). She had headphones on and did not notice my peeping in. I would not startle her.

I walked across a short path to a dining room, a kind of cozy mess hall able to seat perhaps 50 people. A long counter in front divided off the dining area from the kitchen. Looking into it, I was finally able to get the attention of folks to whom I could announce my presence and purpose. Nobody seemed in the least surprised to see me, and I was greeted by young female cooks - volunteers, it turned out. I was then referred back to the first person I’d encountered, a woman called Coffee Worth (the first named picked up in her childhood because of her maiden name, Maxwell). This companionable 88-year-old was quite happy to take me on a tour of the grounds. “The only thing I ask is that we go in your car - I’ve made the rounds once today, and I’m a bit tired from it,” she said, her quick, small steps, bright eyes and nimbleness belying the supposition of infirmity that many attach to age.

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The day was bright and crisp; it was late winter in Northeast Georgia, and a share of what we saw was the beauty that meets the hundreds of thousands of Georgians still pocketed in a countryside of forests, fields and red earth. As my car crunched slowly down the gravel, Coffee pointed out the lone cow in her pen. The cows’ udders were swelled with milk, and she grazed oblivious to our intrusion. “She doesn’t much like people,” Coffee said. “She doesn’t trust them too much.” We also passed a chicken coop. Jubilee has been able to supply about half of the food needs of staff, volunteers and refugees from homegrown vegetables, in addition to dairy, eggs and poultry of its own. There is the occasional addition of wild game. It also also depends heavily on the Athens food bank, Kroger, EarthFare and other sources for maybe half of its food. Supermarket shopping is also an important part of the refugees’ orientation: an adventure in itself.

As we wended past the larger buildings, outbuildings and sheds, a couple of boys came into view, riding their bicycles. Coffee pointed out that they were from the Congo.

“These people have had it really hard,” she said. “But they’re happy out here, and it’s really sad when they have to leave. Before this they were living in refugee camps, sometimes right out in the open. Some of them have gone through terrible, terrible things.” What they had gone through, however horrible, had not extinguished the children’s spirits, as was evident in their smiling faces while biking alongside my car down the path back towards the Koinonia House, or “K House” for short.

Completing the initial tour, I returned to the dining hall, where dinner preparations were proceeding. It was suggested that I arrange to meet the founder of Jubilee, Don Mosley. A call was made, and I received his return call in an old-fashioned phone booth built into the room. He would arrive shortly, being in the midst of baking bread for his wife for Valentine’s Day. Meeting with Don, he invited me back to dinner, to meet the volunteers and refugees, and to get a better sense of daily life at Jubilee.

A few evenings later, I made my way back out to the grounds. I had received a message from Don, cautioning me that the volunteers would be delayed, and that they would not be around until much later. I decided to make use of the opportunity by joining those present for dinner and interviewing Don first. What follows is that interview, which took place in Jubilee’s library.

Flagpole

My first questions for you, Don, would involve how you came upon this vocation, in establishing Jubilee Partners. If you could shed some light on that…

Don Mosley

I’ll try to hit the high points and be brief. I started out as an engineer in Central Texas, yet with a great interest in other countries and cultures, and I was often traveling. That led me into the Peace Corps. After a couple of years as a Peace Corps volunteer, came back to the States, met Carolyn and married her, and drafted her. We went back into the Peace Corps. I had been in Malaysia as a volunteer; then went to Korea, where I was a Peace Corps director over about 125 volunteers at any given time, along the DMZ in South Korea. While we were there we heard about this crazy place in Georgia. In Sumter County. I had no idea where Americus, Georgia was, or any such place. A Christian community called Koinonia Farm. The more I heard about it the more excited I got. We lived there throughout the 1970s. While I was Director of Koinonia in 1976, I helped Millard Fuller found Habitat for Humanity. In 1978, we found this piece of property in Madison County. Three families from Koinonia agreed to be the first to start the community. The other two families have long since moved on. And in 1979, we moved to this property, and started to build the first of the 18 buildings. Carolyn and I have been here ever since that time. It’s now 29 years, in just another few weeks, that we will have been here.

Flagpole

It sounds like, in just a general way, possibly a difference of emphasis between Koinonia and here is that Jubilee has its largest focus on refugees, and perhaps Koinonia has more of the early Habitat orientation: the need for housing for low-income people.

Don Mosley

We came here when we bought this property for Jubilee; from all those brilliant planning sessions that we had, really what we came up with was essentially a cloning off of Koinonia. We were going to build low-cost housing and [had] some emphasis on the green movement, on solar energy. I have built a number of different kinds of solar water-heaters and things we hoped to market to bring in some of our income.

But it was after we came here to this property - actually in the spring and summer of ’79 as we were working on the first building, listening to the radio while we worked - hearing the news about the boat people from Vietnam that, in particular, got our attention. And the more we heard about that, the more we started to think, “We really ought to take this 260 acres and make it into an orientation center.” Refugee resettlement. By the end of the summer of ’79 we set our sights on being prepared one year later to receive refugees. My vision at that point was that we should be able to host between 100 and 150 refugees… I had no idea what I was talking about. We [now] consider 25 or so, 20 to 30, to be a real handful…

But, we laid that out and started building it, and sure enough in September of 1980, the first refugees arrived hours after we had finished the cabins and were just barely ready for them. And they turned out to be not boat-people from Vietnam but boat-people from Cuba, because in the meantime the whole freedom flotilla and the Marielitos episode had taken place. Jimmy Carter was in the White House. We’d had some dealings with Carter down at Koinonia; he was just eight miles away in Plains. All that discovery of refugees in that summer of ’79 and then the preparation through the succeeding 12 months for the first refugees to get here… that just turned us 180 degrees and then changed our visions of what we would be about at Jubilee.

It’s been a marvelous, marvelous way of relating to the whole world, not only for the 3,400 or 3,500 refugees who have come to Jubilee since the fall of 1980, but also for the dozens of trips that we’ve made or projects that we’ve launched around the world - from Iraq, to Nicaragua, to Bosnia, to southeast Asia, Africa, all over. There were Central Americans who were then accepted into Canada; that was a major program we called “Año de Jubileo” that lasted for about eight or 10 years.

Flagpole

So, Jubilee Partners has as least as much of a social investment in projects around the world as it does in having a home base for its work with refugees here in Comer?

Don Mosley

Yes. Both. And I want to say, too, we feel as if we’re making a mistake if we only get excited about projects on the other side of the world. We see the connections very strongly between peace and justice and climate change and things right here around home. We’re very much very self-consciously a Christian community, very ecumenical. We’ve got Catholics, Protestants. We’re mainly just trying to relate to this world with compassion instead of bullets, missiles. That has led us to undertake many projects that very few people would have.

Flagpole

That’s definitely not a “what’s–in-it-for-me” philosophy, except maybe spiritually.

Don Mosley

Yes, spiritually. And it’s an exciting way to live. We have a lot of volunteers who come here on our staff who would have a hard time putting into words what it is that gets them excited about being here. [But] it really is looking for meaning in life, something that is truly fulfilling and exciting instead of just addictions and gluttony in one form or another. And I think our culture is in real danger of just becoming a collection of addictions [laughs], from food to material things to power. And yet people are bored, unfulfilled. And I think we [Jubilee Partners staff] are not at all - we don’t look like the kind of people that come to mind when we think of saints, martyrs or ascetics. We’re having a great time! This is fun.

Flagpole

What about the staff? How do they get here?

Don Mosley

I’m biased, of course, but I think we get the absolute cream of the crop from all around the country and all around the world. Catherine has been in Bolivia for two or three years. Sue and Blake spent a decade in El Salvador from 1970–1980 during the bloodiest part of the war in El Salvador… she was there about half that time. They were co-directors of the Mennonite Volunteer Committee, an international church volunteer agency. They lived behind guerilla lines, in fact. They chose to be out in the village, not supporting the violence of the guerillas, but they said that’s where the suffering was and so they ran a national program of volunteers in El Salvador. They felt it was more appropriate to do that out among the people who were being massacred. The El Mazote Massacre, where a thousand or so people were killed, happened just down the road from where they were living. They were out in genuinely dangerous stuff. And so it has been with almost all the year-round staff - they’ve lived and worked all over the world.

Flagpole

Do you see the issue of refugees for you as one that begins with your religious sense, or is it more a matter of the experiences that you’ve accumulated in your life, or both?

Don Mosley

That’s a very interesting question. I don’t think - on the one hand - we did not choose to work with refuges because it sounded Biblical somehow. I’m not conscious that that was a part of our thinking. We were living in tents for the first few months ourselves, and we could identify with people who were uprooted and began to sympathize with them in a new way that we had not before. I think that’s what was happening at a subliminal level, a slightly subconscious level.

But I think you ask a question that is really worth considering… there is a real Biblical tradition of refugees… Not only the Exodus; Abraham, before that, being a wanderer out of the civilization that had been so advanced already, over at Ur of Chaldea. I’ve visited those areas in Iraq, and he sort of went out into the wilderness of Palestine from there. Jesus was a refugee. I’m writing a book right now on the subject of hope, giving stories of why I’m so hopeful despite the fact that I’ve gone from one war zone to another now for 40 years. I’ve been in war zones all over the world, war zones that, as you sit and talk you hear “dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah,” within range of those guns very often. And I don’t know what it is that has drawn me to them, but I have met some of the most courageous and hopeful people, including these refugees who come through Jubilee, coming out of some of the most horrendous atrocities that human brutality has been able to manage.

Flagpole

Do you think the market for meaning is going to boom any time soon?

Don Mosley

I hope so. I think the alternative is depression and people just eating themselves to death and sitting in front of televisions endlessly, and doing mindless stuff. And the world can’t take that much longer. We’re destroying the world in the process.

Edmund J. Smith

To be continued with an account of meeting a group of young refugees from Liberia and learning their stories.