Young people who come to the Glenmary Farm in Vanceburg, Ky., are searching. Although some say they come without expectations, others instinctively know that time spent as a Glenmary volunteer at the Farm will mold and shape their lives in unexpected ways.

“This is a place where high school students can get away from the TV and their PlayStations,” says current Farm manager Joe Grosek. “They have to deal with people, and that brings them to a different level. Everyone is equal at the Farm. They find that people are awesome and cool to be with.”

Don’t waste any time looking for a cash crop at the Glenmary Farm. Aside from a good-sized kitchen garden, traditional farming is nowhere to be seen on this 50 acres in Lewis County.

“We raise people!” says the Glenmary Farm’s promotional brochure. Each year nearly 500 volunteers—mostly high school and college students—spend a week in this rugged, rural area of Eastern Kentucky. Many have experiences there they will never forget.

From the early 1970s until the present, over 15,000 young people have come to the Farm bringing energy, enthusiasm and a desire to reach out to people in need. Some come for a week as part of Glenmary’s Appalachian Group Volunteer program. Others come for a year to serve as “Farm managers,” who provide supervision of the short-term volunteers, line up community service sites and help put this service experience in the context of prayerful reflection.

The evaluations that volunteers complete at the end of their week of service indicate they learn things they never imagined. Many say they are delighted by the new possibilities that open before them.

And some of these young people discover not only new directions for their lives—but also the person with whom to share that direction.

Romance and service blossom together

Tom Carew began managing the Farm volunteer program when Glenmary first acquired the property in 1972. His first volunteers were six women from St. Teresa College in Winona, Minn. One of them was Molly Barrett, a nursing student.

We didn’t hit it off at first,” Tom recalls. “But when Molly came back to work at Holy Redeemer (Glenmary’s mission in Vanceburg), the romance began.”

After her volunteer time was completed, Molly returned to Winona to finish college. When she joined the Navy and was stationed in Portsmouth, Va., their courtship continued long distance, with Tom frequently riding ”The Cardinal,” an Amtrak train that still runs between Kentucky and Virginia. After her discharge, Molly moved to Morehead to work at the new St. Claire Home Health Center. “Both the job and the relationship were successful,” Molly reports.

Tom, a native of Flushing, N.Y., has lived in Kentucky for 30 years. Today he works for the Kentucky Housing Corporation, an agency that helps make housing affordable for low-income people. Molly is a nurse practitioner at St. Claire’s Clinic in Sandy Brook, Ky., making health care available to people who might otherwise have none. The Carews have four children, ages 22, 20, 17 and 15.

Burt and Delinda Fehringer also found common values as they worked together at the Glenmary Farm. Although she was a big-city girl and he a small-town boy, both discovered a desire for service work after finishing college.

Burt grew up on a 400-acre farm in American Falls, Idaho. After graduation from Idaho State University and a year’s work in Seattle, he moved to Kentucky to serve at the Glenmary Farm.

Delinda grew up in Corpus Christi and Dallas, Texas. During her senior year in college, she was walking down a hallway and literally tripped over a copy of Connections, a directory of service opportunities for lay Catholics.

She recalls picking up the book and saying to a friend, “Yeah, like I’d ever do anything like that!” But Delinda kept the book for two years and eventually decided to search out an opportunity for volunteer service in the Appalachian Mountains, an area which fascinated her.

Delinda first accepted a position with an organization in a different area of Kentucky. But then she received a call from Sister Conall O’Connell asking her to consider changing her mind and come to Vanceburg to work with the Christian Community Center, a program closely associated with the Glenmary Farm.

“I’d be one of a group of four volunteers rather than 60,” Delinda recalls, “and something about that appealed to me. If I was going to do this, I wanted to go someplace that was rural and remote and where they needed the most help.” Soon after she arrived in Vanceburg she met Burt, who was serving as the Farm manager at that time (1992-93).

Katie and Andrew Higgins had both made trips to Vanceburg in previous years, but they met when groups they were leading from their respective colleges shared a week at the Farm in 1998. Before the week began Andrew, a student at Fordham, made frequent phone calls to Katie at St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn., to plan activities and make arrangements for the week. Then they finally met face-to-face. “In those six days that we worked together, we hit it off,” Andrew says.

After the first day they knew they wanted to get to know each other better. “When we left after that week,” Andrew recalls, “we decided we wanted to try to make a long-distance relationship work.”

The couple communicated by telephone and e-mail. Then a few days after graduation in 1999, Andrew packed his car and moved to St. Paul where Katie was finishing her last year of school. They married in October 1999. During that year Andrew worked in the social justice office of the Archdiocese of Minneapolis/St. Paul.

Alternative style of courtship

Couples who met as volunteers at the Farm emphasize how their relationship was nurtured as they focused on meeting the needs of others. “It was in that spirit of giving that our relationship really flourished,” says Burt.

“We really got to know each other in a different way, in a much more healthy way,” says Tom of his courtship of Molly.

“Dating” in Vanceburg takes on its own unique flavor. For one thing, dinner and a movie would probably involve a roadside diner and a trip to the video store. Delinda and Burt, though, chose to stay focused on their original reasons for volunteering. Rather than isolating themselves, the young couple worked together on service projects. In the long run, that service focus enabled them to learn far more about each other than they might have in a more conventional courtship, they say.

Almost two years to the day after they met, Burt proposed to Delinda on the spot where they met—Holy Redeemer Church in Vanceburg.

In 1995 Delinda and Burt were married in American Falls, where they now live with their two children, Amaya, almost 4, and Gabriel, 13 months. Father George Mathis, the pastor at Holy Redeemer during Burt and Delinda’s Farm days, came from Tennessee to witness the couple’s vows. As Delinda puts it, “He was instrumental in our faith walk.”

The lessons learned in Vanceburg continue to solidify their marriage, Delinda says. “We try to live simply and to keep the spirit alive. It’s hard. But if we hadn’t been at the Farm, we couldn’t do what we do.”

The “faith walk” that they began in Kentucky continues in Idaho, Burt says. “Our Catholicism really got a shot in the arm.”

Part of an Extended Family

Former Farm managers and Glenmary volunteers from the Vanceburg area feel a strong connection with each other—and with Glenmary. Some still live in the area, like Tom and Molly Carew.

Delinda and Burt Fehringer returned to Idaho, where Burt works the family farm and Delinda cares for their family. But they have close, albeit long-distance, relationships with other former volunteers, several of whom traveled to Idaho for their wedding.

Today, Katie and Andrew Higgins live in Green Bay, Wis., where they moved to be closer to Katie’s family. Although they are both working in for-profit settings, they can still identify the influence that Glenmary and the Farm had on their lives.

“It gave us the ability to be open-minded and to deal with people who are different than we are,” Andrew says. “We learned so much about what’s important in life.”

First married Farm managers

In May 1999 Erik and Janel Aleson made Farm history by becoming the first married couple to take the responsibility of managing the Glenmary volunteer program in Lewis County. The couple met when they took a service trip to the Farm in 1996 as students at The University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point. Erik was a sophomore; Janel was a freshman.

“We fell in love with the area,” Janel says, and they returned several times during their student days. On what Janel thought was just a routine visit to the Farm, Erik proposed at a waterfall in the woods. The couple married in May 1999 and graduated in December of that same year.

This Farm couple visited “their spot” at the Farm again during their honeymoon. As they were hiking through the intoxicating springtime woods in Appalachia, they talked to Brother Virgil Siefker about returning as Farm managers, the first time that a married couple would serve in the position.

Spending their first year of marriage at the Farm gave Erik and Janel “a wonderful opportunity to get to know each other in a whole different way,” Erik said. “Sometimes it was challenging, but it was a wonderful first year of marriage.”

They relate stories of sharing a bathroom with the volunteers. They even lacked a bedroom door at one point. These challenging times, though, made their marriage stronger. Erik and Janel recall how Father Jerry Dorn helped them through the difficult times by pointing to the sky and saying, “Trust.”

When groups are in residence, the pace is swift and the work begins in early morning and continues until nearly midnight, Janel recalls. “Sometimes when we had groups, Erik and I didn’t get to talk much, but the off weeks were really good. It was fun, but exhausting.”

Young love kept this couple going as they looked for unique ways to work on the bond of their new marriage, despite life in a “fishbowl.” “We learned more about prayer and the increased importance of prayer in our lives,” Janel says.

Farm lessons live on

When Glenmary established the Farm in 1972, it was conceived as a place of discernment for men considering Glenmary priesthood or brotherhood. When the number of vocation prospects began to decline, the Farm continued to be used as a place where young people could experience a life of simplicity and service.

Like Burt and Delinda, Erik and Janel carried away from the Farm the desire to live a simple life, uncluttered by material things. “We’d rather have less money and be happy,” Janel says. “That’s what I found really valuable.”

Tom recalls the Glenmary experience as a great thing. “We learned that we should be good listeners—not kingdom builders, but people builders. We learned that we’re here to be servants—and that struck both of us. The lessons we learned at the Farm had a great influence on who we are today.”

Janel recalls talking to her father after she and Erik had made the decision to volunteer at the Farm. “You know how parents are. They said, ‘You’re going to do what?’ But when I was talking to my dad, he asked me about the people. I was telling him about how they lived with so little, and he stopped me and said, ‘Are they happy?’

“I stopped to think about it, and said, ‘Yes.’ That really struck me.”

Some Farm couples knew during their volunteer time that they would eventually want to start families. They also knew they would have a rich tradition of service to pass on to their children. Tom and Molly Carew are convinced that their life of service to Eastern Kentucky has already influenced many of the decisions their own young adult children have made.

Today, the Alesons live in Logansport, Ind. Erik works as a park superintendent in Cass County; Janel cares for their baby daughter, Laurel, who was named for the mountain laurel in the hills of Kentucky.

“Janel and I hope that our marriage will become a life-long service to God and others around us,” Erik says. “We also want to pass along to our children a love of serving others. We hope someday to bring our children to the Farm to experience for themselves just how rewarding service is.”

Margaret Gabriel is a freelance writer who lives in Lexington, Ky.