“People there, like people here, get up every day and go to work and try to make a living providing for their families,” she said. “The one thing that struck me early on was that my village was very much like Erwin, with the same hopes and dreams, the same problems, the same idiosyncrasies that any small town anywhere experiences. God, church, family, politics, celebrations, parades, fairs, music, dance, joy, sadness — it’s all the same. There is a different ‘tone’ perhaps to the music, but the lyrics are identical: faith, hope, love.”
Marty returns from Peace Corps in Saint Kitts with a new spirit for service
Marty returns from Peace Corps with a new spirit for service
Marty Landis just returned from her venture with the Peace Corps. (Eileen Rush / The Erwin Record)
By Eileen Rush
Staff Writer
erush@erwinrecord.net
Two years ago, she left for the adventure of a lifetime and the hardest job she would ever love.
Now that it’s over, she said she could cry for days. The grieving process has begun for her life-changing experience as a Peace Corps volunteer on the Eastern Caribbean island of St. Kitts.
“I have nothing to be crying about, but there is a sadness in me,” Marty Landis, a 66-year-old resident of Spivey Mountain, said in an interview in her mountain home one month after her return to the United States. “And in talking to the other volunteers, they say they are feeling the same thing.”
The island of St. Kitts might be known for its tourism trade, but Marty said the day-to-day culture on the island reminded her of home.
“People there, like people here, get up every day and go to work and try to make a living providing for their families,” she said. “The one thing that struck me early on was that my village was very much like Erwin, with the same hopes and dreams, the same problems, the same idiosyncrasies that any small town anywhere experiences. God, church, family, politics, celebrations, parades, fairs, music, dance, joy, sadness — it’s all the same. There is a different ‘tone’ perhaps to the music, but the lyrics are identical: faith, hope, love.”
Peace Corps volunteers are asked to go to a community that they know very little about and immerse themselves into friendships and projects to improve that community. Then, they must make themselves dispensable so that the community can stand on its own without them.
They must leave. It’s heartbreaking. Yet, she said her work is something to be proud of. Her top goal when she began was simply to finish, but the trip became so much more than that. On the island, Marty developed deep friendships. A grandmother of two, she quickly adopted children of the small village of Mansion, with its 100 households, as her own.
“Miss Mati,” the island residents called her.
She was one of 17 volunteers to go to St. Kitts, the only one to be stationed in Mansion and the oldest volunteer of the group.
While telling her story, one moment she is laughing, and the next, tears roll down her cheeks. She poured everything into her work, and was rewarded with emotional and spiritual growth.
She began each day on her knees, talking to God. “I have no idea what I am doing,” she would say, and then ask for guidance. Then she would rise and begin her day. Each day ended the same way — giving thanks.
At the end of the day, “I would sink one more time on my knees to thank God for my day, not knowing if anything I had done had really made a ‘difference’ in their lives, but knowing, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it had made a difference in mine.”
She spent the first six months walking through Mansion every day, introducing herself. She asked community members what they needed. Then she used her skills — a lifetime of work in community development with low-income areas — to serve.
“I knew on the front end the most important thing I could do was listen,” Marty said.
The Chattanooga native worked to develop a library, a community action committee and a new community center.
While on the island, she studied in depth the history of slavery. The island was once a British colony overlaid in sugar cane. Slavery was abolished in 1834. Afterwards, the local people who were slave descendants worked the sugar cane. After the sugar trade was no longer profitable to the British, the United Kingdom granted the island its independence and made the island’s new government buy its land back.
This taught Marty what she calls the “insidiousness of colonialism,” because colonialism teaches communities to look to another entity to solve its problems. Its affects are crippling. But knowledge isn’t the only thing she gained.
“I am more flexible now,” she said. “I am more tolerant and I love all people more.”
She said she would not hesitate to recommend the experience to anyone — no matter their age, gender or background. She said she wishes “every young person in the world” could join.
“Apply, and hang on — you’re in for the ride of your life,” Marty said. “It will take you places you never thought you would go. It changes you in ways you have never imagined. Life is changed for the better with the Peace Corps experience.”
The greatest thing someone can take away, she said, is learning to value the human race. She points to her head. “Everything I knew before I left was here,” she said, and then points to her heart, “and now it has become a reality. I have lived it.”
