Politics/Community Involvement

I think it’s an amazing time right now because I think that the playing field has really never been more level than it is right now.  I think there is just amazing opportunities that I don’t think were necessarily there 30, 40, 50 years ago for women to be just as successful as men traditionally have been in business. I think you are going to see more and more female COO’s, more and more female CFO’s, and more and more female CEO’s of companies, more and more women on the board of directors.  I think it’s a really exciting time.

I had  learned to live in a setting that was completely foreign, completely different to what I had grown up with. In the Peace Corps I was living in a mountain village with no electricity, no running water.  Went to bed with the sun, woke up with the sun, farmers all around me, learned to plant rice, walked to the school right down the rice paddy path to teach, hiked to the next school to teach.  So I knew the pace of life and I knew a little bit about the priorities, the things that are important to people who are living in that sort of setting in terms of getting food, making sure your children have food–not necessarily some of the things we would worry about in the Western world although people do worry about getting food definitely here, but in a different context.  So the skills of being able to sort of step outside of yourself and really be open to observing and to listening and to following what others around you are doing regardless of whether it is something you think is funny or awkward or different or just doing as they do. I think that's a life lesson that I think everybody could use [laughs] and it's hard to get that life lesson though unless you're thrown in a setting where people are different around you.  You don't get that and I think that's part of where some of the myopic views that we see in America come from, not just America, the Western world in general, the modern world, people who are around people like them all day long or they're avoiding the people that are around them that are different, actively avoiding them.  They don't ever have that understanding of the other and what the other is.

I am the co-founder of a lay Catholic community that’s ecumenical, interfaith, and open to all. No one is unwelcome here under any circumstances and so Brayton and I co-founded this community with two missionaries from Haiti and a priest. He’s a Melkite priest in the Eastern Rite, in 1982. So now I am part of this whole sustainable operation and we teach. We do courses here. We do programs here. We have hundreds of college students come here every year for the immersions. We started this community, Agape, but [first] in Brockton, sort of in the inner city of Brockton, with the idea that we would become more residential. People would come and live with us. We started a community with this family, but then we had this dream after five years that we really needed to reduce our lifestyle even more, grow our own food, not use fossil fuels, heat by wood. We drove a car that drove on vegetable oil, we had a grease car for a while. Now we have an electric car. So we really wanted to scale down even more so this afforded the opportunity to come to this land and we got interest-free loans and we got donations. By the time we moved here in 1987, people knew us fairly well. We had been at the peace issues or doing one thing or another with peace-making for about 15 years, so people knew us and people were willing to support donations.  ...... All of our protesting came out of our faith. So before we went anywhere and witnessed against anything, we said we would pray together. We said we would have long periods of prayer together. What is God calling us to?  How is God calling us? How is God touching our hearts?  Before we would act, and then we would act nonviolently.  

The school [was my inspiration].  My children had been finished with grammar school for a long time, but I kept pursuing it knowing that they needed a new school there.  I mean the play yard was all broken  in front of the school, the cement or whatever it was made of.  So, I kept pursuing that and we did get a new school.  They put in the new school and they put in the library, which we didn't have, and then they dedicated the library to Jane Petrella.  If you want to go down, my picture is there.  Again, it was a neighborhood event.  We had a true artist in the village who painted my portrait.  The "mothers’ club" engaged his doing it.  I guess it is the "parents’ group" that they call it now.  People come up to me and say, "Thank you for the school."

So that was my beginning at the YWCA and an understanding of the complexity of poverty and the impact on women and girls and not having an opportunity to see the world as a possibility for growth and a place that was so hindered by being poor and uneducated.  And I paid attention to that.  Of course I was in a fertile place because the YWCA of Central Mass is all about the empowerment of women and the elimination of racism.