The name
”
Jonestown
”
conjures up unpleasant memories for adults who lived in the San
Francisco Bay Area back in 1978. This small outpost in the jungle
of Guyana was the location of a horrific mass murder/suicide,
including the death of U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan.
The name “Jonestown” conjures up unpleasant memories for adults who lived in the San Francisco Bay Area back in 1978. This small outpost in the jungle of Guyana was the location of a horrific mass murder/suicide, including the death of U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan.
Well, there is another Jonestown, this one in a poverty-stricken area of Mississippi. The story of Jonestown, Miss., is one of Christians from the Bay Area reaching out to help some of our nation’s neediest citizens.
Jonestown is definitely a depressed area. This town of about 50 Caucasions and 1,700 African-Americans is located 50 miles south of Memphis, Tenn. Almost the only jobs there are in agriculture and seasonal in nature; unemployment is near 50 percent. Half its families are below the poverty level and the town is plagued with a high teen pregnancy rate.
In the 1980s several orders of Roman Catholic nuns looked around to see where they could help people in need. One of these nuns is Sister Teresa Shields, who at the time was teaching at a Catholic school in an affluent area of Seattle, Wash. She and other members of her order, The Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, chose the destitute town of Jonestown to begin a new ministry.
The poverty of this area is hard for middle class people to grasp: There are no paved roads, and only a third of households own cars, making it difficult to work in neighboring towns.
The Catholic Diocese of Jackson welcomed the sisters. Although the area of Jonestown has almost no Catholic residents, Bishop Houck told them they were “not to evangelize, but to teach.”
The sisters, with practically no government funding, have established many important programs:
– A Montessori preschool to teach readiness skills
– A tutoring center, a refugee for older students, which supplements instruction of the local schools
– Parenting programs for teens and young adults
– A health clinic run by a nun who is a nurse practitioner.
For the past eight years Pat Alexander, a first-grade teacher at San Jose’s Holy Spirit School, has offered an opportunity for students at her school to help in this ministry.
Located in affluent Almaden Valley, HSS students are separated as much by economics as by geography from the struggling Mississippi students. Each year in May, Alexander announces the collection of gently used sports equipment and school supplies to be sent to Jonestown. The message goes out to the students themselves, not to their parents. She explains that she wants to “train the children to give,” not to just get money from their parents. Sixth-graders volunteer to sort the donated goods and pack the boxes for shipping. This year they sent 38 boxes of gifts: paper, sports uniforms, notebooks, back packs, baby clothing, balls, etc.
To learn more about the Jonestown Learning Center, contact Sister Teresa at ts******@*mi.net; to learn more about the efforts of HSS students in helping the poor of Jonestown, contact Alexander at Pa***********@***************ol.org.
