Abstract
Megan Wilson-Reitz recollects her early life growing up in a diverse community which steered her towards a life of faith and social justice. Wilson-Reitz shares her involvement with community organizing in the Cleveland Nonviolence Network, the Cleveland Catholic Worker, and then her role as a board member for the Ohio City Near West Development Corporation.
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Interviewee
Wilson-Reitz, Megan (interviewee)
Interviewer
White, Bali (interviewer)
Project
Near West Side Housing Activism
Date
7-12-2024
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
76 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Megan Wilson-Reitz interview, 12 July 2024" (2024). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 544007.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/1278
Transcript
Bali White [00:00:02] Hi everybody, it’s Bali White here with the Cleveland Regional Oral History Project. Today I am here with Megan Wilson-Reitz at the Carnegie West Library in the Near West Side. Today is July 12, 2024. First and foremost, how are you?
Megan Wilson-Reitz [00:00:21] Doing great. I’m so excited to be here.
Bali White [00:00:22] Awesome, me too. So we’re going to kind of get right into this. So could you introduce yourself, kind of when and where you were born and any important details you feel like including?
Megan Wilson-Reitz [00:00:33] I can try. So I’m a Clevelander. Native Clevelander. I was born on the east side, so I grew up in Cleveland Heights in South Euclid, went to school at Brush High School, so grew up all east sider. I went to Baldwin Wallace College for undergraduate, and when I was there, that’s when I got connected to the community of the Near West Side. So my family is native Clevelanders going several generations back. So I’ve always felt really connected to the city. I think a lot of folks in my generation moved out and back or were considering leaving Cleveland. And there was a time when Cleveland looked like it was really not the place to be, but that was never something that I considered. I always wanted to stay in the city. So, I mean, you’re a Cleveland State, so, you know. [crosstalk] Yeah. So, I grew up, my parents were teachers. Well, one, my father was a music teacher for Richmond Heights City Schools my whole growing up. And my mother was a social worker. And I think Mom being a social worker really informed a lot of sort of my way of thinking about, like, being, what does it mean to be a person in the world? What does it mean to be a person who’s embedded in community? And so, yeah, I think that was really formative for me. She ran the Social Work program at Ursuline College for the past, I don’t know, 35 years or so, right until she died last year. And she was really, for her, it was really important to give people to the community as social workers, right? So, like, raising up people, educating people to be of service to the community, right? And so I feel like I was sort of raised that way, too. Like, you are a person who’s being raised in service of something and, of other people, and that that’s an important part of who you need to be in the world. And I think that my brother and I both, you know, got that message really clearly from her. Yeah.
Bali White [00:02:51] Absolutely. Could you touch base on your religious background?
Megan Wilson-Reitz [00:02:54] Yeah. So I grew up Catholic, and we were part of a historically very diverse Catholic church, but one of the few Catholic churches in the city that had a significant African American Catholic population. And so I think that was really formative for me in ways I didn’t really realize until much later. But what does it mean to be a person of faith? What does it mean to be a person of faith in the city? What does it mean to be part of a diverse community of worship? You know, and as an adult, having done a lot of work in the Catholic church as a professional, the whiteness of the American Catholic Church is always jarring for me because I didn’t grow up in a predominantly White church. So for me, growing up as a person of faith was sort of integrated into the sort of other understandings about community. And, you know, I grew up with a fairly progressive, you know, look, progressive way of understanding the faith, right? I always understood being Catholic as being primarily about justice and being primarily about doing the work of God in the world, building the kingdom of God. Like that, that was always, like, a really big piece of my religious formation. And so it was sort of a natural fit with the Catholic Worker and some of the other things that came later, because that was, that I was raised with, but also went to public school. And I think if I had gone to Catholic school, I probably wouldn’t have remained Catholic, because I think Catholic schools, this idea that there’s sort of a hegemony, right? Like, everybody believes this thing, and this is the power structure believes this thing, and you are supposed to believe this thing. I didn’t have any of that growing up, and so I always saw my faith as being something I chose very independently, and it wasn’t forced on me and so that’s probably why I grew into it as an adult the way that I did. Absolutely.
Bali White [00:04:58] So you had mentioned you went to public schools growing up. Could you kind of talk a little bit about that, just your experience?
Megan Wilson-Reitz [00:05:08] Yeah, public school was a great experience. I grew up in a really, it was a very diverse community. A lot of- There’s a large Jewish community in South Euclid-Lyndhurst, you know, Beachwood, kind of that area where I grew up. And so, you know, a lot of my friends were Jewish. A lot of my friends were from other faith traditions. I had a lot of friends who were from immigrant families from all over the world. I had a lot of friends who just had really different life experiences and perspectives and faith traditions for me. So I felt like I was really- And I, you know, now, as an adult, looking back, like, I was really fortunate to live in a really diverse environment and community and to have had really authentic friendships with people who were very different from me. You know, and now, as a professional, my job is, I do diversity and inclusion consulting. That’s my profession now. And so I think growing up in an environment where I understood people before I understood race, culture, ethnicity, meant that those things were never abstract. Right? They were always personal. And so I think that my school environment was, for me, really important because it was diverse and because I had this, you know, really rich community as a kid growing up where I did.
Bali White [00:06:42] So you had mentioned that you went to Baldwin Wallace. When did you attend Baldwin Wallace? And kind of What did you study?
Megan Wilson-Reitz [00:06:51] I went there from 1998 to 2002. I studied Theater, and then I did minors in History and Political Science, and I tried a minor in Music, but I didn’t finishing because minoring in Music of Baldwin Wallace is its own thing. But, yeah, so. But Theater major. And I got really involved in a lot of social justice, political kinds of advocacy when I was there. And Baldwin Wallace, if you know anything about Baldwin Wallace’s culture, like, that’s not really a part of the culture of the school. And so I would, you know, have administrators introduce me in meetings as, oh, this is our campus activist. Like, I was the one campus activist, you know? So I sort of got a reputation at school for being like, you know, we have to care about this. And everyone’s like, do we have to care about that? Like, sign this petition. Another one. You know? So I was sort of that I was really annoying in college, but I was- But I was very invested in a lot of different social justice work. And because I didn’t have much community of other students who were doing that work, I started, you know, seeking out connections with organizations and people in the community who were doing it because I needed support. And that’s how I ended up connecting with the folks on the Near West Side was when I was at BW.
Bali White [00:08:04] So that actually brings me to that question of what exactly brought you to the Near West Side?
Megan Wilson-Reitz [00:08:09] Yeah, so I was very involved at. Well, so, okay, so I grew up Catholic, right? And so as a Catholic, one of the things that I embraced as a fairly young adulthood was the pro-life movement’s message around the preservation of life. And for me, it was like, it just made sense. Right? You’ve got this pro-life movement, but you also have the anti-war movement, and you also have the anti-death penalty movement, and, you know, it’s the consistent ethic of life, right? That’s sort of the messaging or the seamless garment ethic. And so, for me, as a young adult, I saw that as making just a whole lot of sense. And I would say that my thoughts about some of that are much more nuanced as an adult or as an older adult. As a younger adult, though, for me, this connecting the dots on those issues across this ethic of life was really important. And I got really- I took that really seriously. In college I wanted to start a pro-life group on campus, and someone said, convinced me that, hey, you know, you care about all these other issues, too. Why don’t you loop them all in and it can be a consistent ethic of life group? Well, I thought that was a great idea, except nobody was on board. Nobody. Nobody was on board. And so I had, like, three friends, and the four of us were the group, and we were like, we’re gonna have a protest. It would be the four of us. We’re gonna have a sit in. It would be the four of us. Like, we- [laughs] We were very enthusiastic, but we were embattled all the time. And so where were we going? Okay, so I started trying to do all of these different projects with this group to try to talk up like, we’re about social justice, we’re about life, we care about all these things. And everyone’s like, this makes no sense to us. There’s not much of a Catholic population. It’s a very Catholic perspective. Right? But we didn’t have a very large Catholic population at BW, so there wasn’t sort of this institutional or kind of cultural understanding that like, oh, yeah, this is a way that people think about things. It was like, what are they doing? Are they right wing or are they left wing? What are they? Right? So anyway, so we started coordinating a bunch of different activities and things, and I was reaching out to some organizations that I had connected with because I was doing social justice things already on campus. And one of those organizations that I got connected with really early was the Inter-Religious Task Force on Central America. And so the IRTF was coordinating groups of people in Cleveland to travel down to Fort Benning in Georgia to protest the School of the Americas. So you’re nodding. So you’ve heard this before. I’m not the first person to talk about this.
Bali White [00:11:03] I’ve heard a little bit, yes.
Megan Wilson-Reitz [00:11:04] Yeah. So the School of the Americas was, still is. It does not call The School of the Americas anymore, but it still exists. And it is a military training center on the grounds of Fort Benning in Georgia that trains military primarily from Latin America to engage in the counterrevolutionary and counterinsurgency techniques. Graduates of the School of the Americas have been responsible for a lot of major human rights violations against people of Latin America. So for decades now, people have been going and protesting this. And so I wanted to bring a group down there, but I couldn’t get enough people at BW who were interested. And so I connected with IRTF, and we sort of joined up with them and ended up being part of that for a couple of years. But that’s where I started to meet all these other folks who were involved in the Near West Side. For me, my faith commitment and my work for justice had always been sort of this, like, parallel thing. Like, I saw the connections, but I didn’t see a lot of other people actually doing that. And so going to the School of the Americas was the first time that I really, like, looked around and saw a lot of people living out their faith in this really sort of embodied way, doing protest work. And I was like, this is what I want to do. This is like, this makes a lot of sense to me. I felt a real vocational call to that work. And so I started seeking out more and more connections with that. And the folks who were doing that work who I met and who I knew were people who were already living here on the Near West Side. So. And they were all at the time. So I was in college, 20, 21, 22 years old, and I was connecting with folks who were mostly in their forties at the time. So they had been here doing the work already as adults for a while when I got plugged in. And so there was a period of time where almost all of my friends were, you know, a couple decades older than me. And I was very quickly embraced by that community as a college student. And I think I always felt like- I always felt surprised that they wanted me to be around, like, well, I don’t bring anything to this community. And they were like, we don’t care. We just think you’re cool. And I was like, really? You want me to be? You know, I felt so- And I remember really clearly the moment when I realized that I did not have a transactional relationship with this community, that I was part of it. I remember the very moment because I had been involved with- This was Cleveland Nonviolence Network was in motion at the time, and I was doing a lot of volunteering work with them. And we were doing these peace witnesses where we would go, and I stand on street corners or downtown, and we would. And it was, this was right after September 11, 2001. And so that’s, I got really connected with them because of that. And we would be standing outside with our signs or whatever, and we went to a sign making party for something. I don’t remember what it was. Maybe it was the Peace Show, actually, I don’t remember. But we went to this, you know, gathering at somebody’s house where we were all making these banners, and it was super fun. I’m making the banners. Well, then I was leaving within a few days to start my volunteer year in Chile. And at the party, somebody brought a Polaroid camera, and they took a bunch of photos of, like, me with other people. And then right before I left, they handed me this, like, framed- Well, it’s just, like, a little thing in a frame, and I think it’s a Cleveland Nonviolence Network, and it had photos tucked into the frame of these Polaroids, like, clips of the Polaroids that were tucked in the frame. And they gave it to me, like, so you don’t forget about your community while you’re away. And I was so struck by that. Like, I didn’t realize they saw me as part of the community. Right? It was like I had permission to consider myself in this family of people. So that was really meaningful to me. And I think, you know, As an adult, I try to remember what that felt like. And, like, now that I’m in my forties and I’m seeing young people, like, to remember, like, people need to be invited in, right? People need to know that they belong and that you think that they belong, because most people won’t assume they belong unless you tell them. So, for me, that moment of being told, well, no, you’re one of us, was very meaningful, and it was just a handful of Polaroids tucked in a plexiglass frame. Like, it was not a huge thing, but it was very meaningful.
Bali White [00:15:59] Right, exactly. So, yeah, you know, even as small of a gesture as it may have seemed, it really had, like, an effect, which is important. And that’s something I’ve noticed just being down here doing these oral history projects is everybody’s very welcoming, and it’s an amazing, amazing community, for sure.
Megan Wilson-Reitz [00:16:19] It is. It is. And, you know, it’s. We’re not perfect, right? But we got our stuff. We got our drama. We got our weird personalities, like, like any community. But I think there’s a sense that, yeah, people are weird. People are hard to get along with, and, you know, we do things that hurt each other, and we do things that are stupid, and that doesn’t change the fact that we are in community, and that that’s- That doesn’t change. Right? And I don’t think we have a lot of good examples of that in our culture. Right? Because, like, yeah, you have a friend who does something stupid or hurtful, it’s like, well, I don’t talk to that friend anymore. Right? And sometimes you have to. Right? Sometimes it’s, what’s healthy is to end relationships. Not to say that that doesn’t happen or shouldn’t happen, but. But the idea that as a community, we are responsible for each other and we belong to each other even when that’s hard, I don’t see that everywhere. And so I think, and for a lot of people, I think that’s why this community has become a chosen family as well, because families of origin don’t always do that well either. Right? I was lucky that I have a family of origin that does do that well consistently. But for those who don’t, this way of being in community, that commitment over time to each other, I think, it’s the family that people don’t always have. Right?
Bali White [00:17:53] Absolutely. So I guess. Could you kind of describe how this area looked upon your arrival to the Catholic Worker in terms of, like, conditions, demographics?
Megan Wilson-Reitz [00:18:04] Yeah. I didn’t pay a lot of attention.
Bali White [00:18:10] Yeah.
Megan Wilson-Reitz [00:18:11] So [laughs] I, you know, I saw that question. I thought, I don’t-
Bali White [00:18:15] And that’s okay.
Megan Wilson-Reitz [00:18:16] Yeah.
Bali White [00:18:17] You’re not the first one to say that.
Megan Wilson-Reitz [00:18:18] Right.
Bali White [00:18:19] It’s so involved in what you’re doing that you don’t really necessarily.
Megan Wilson-Reitz [00:18:22] Well, then you just sort of take it for granted. Like, this is what the community is. And then, like, you wake up 20 years later and you’re like, wait, this is really different. Right? So, I mean, just in terms of, like, the way that this particular physical neighborhood has changed in terms of demographic. Yeah, I came in around the early 2000s. That change was already well underway. And so it’s accelerated dramatically in the last 20 years in terms of gentrification, in terms of the kind of the way in which the neighborhood is perceived by people. It’s a lot whiter now. It’s a lot wealthier now than it was when I first moved here in 2004, but it’s, it was already happening, I guess, is what I would say about that. Yeah.
Bali White [00:19:19] So earlier you had mentioned the Cleveland Nonviolence Network. Can you kind of share how you got involved with that and some of the things you were doing?
Megan Wilson-Reitz [00:19:25]Yeah. A couple of misguided folks flew planes into the World Trade Center. I was a senior in college, and I was living that year in a house, actually in Old Brooklyn. It was an old funeral home that had been repurposed as student housing. And it was supposed to be, like, urban plunge style housing, like urban immersion housing, like, we were supposed to be living in the city and, like, doing volunteer work, and it didn’t work very well, but it was a nice idea. It was- It was a clever idea. So I was living in this house with a few other housemates and felt very lonely. I was, because I wasn’t living for the first year. I wasn’t living on campus. I had been on campus my first three years. And so I’m a senior in college. I’m living in this house off campus with these other roommates, all of whom have their own stuff and are not, like, in the same sort of mindset as I am. And then this thing happens. And for me, it was really- And for everybody, it was big, right? I mean, that’s- You don’t remember probably.
Bali White [00:20:39] I was two. [laughs]
Megan Wilson-Reitz [00:20:40] Yeah. So. But for folks in my generation who were very, you know, young adults, it was a very transformative moment. A lot changed in the world for us in that moment. I mean, not just, like, the stuff that we think of in our, like, security theater of TSA and, like, all of that, like, that kind of- That has changed, but you get used to things quickly. But I think in a more profound sense, we had not understood ourselves as being a culture in global conflict, even though we were. We always were. But we didn’t have a self understanding of that culturally until September 11. And from that point till now, there’s never not been a moment when I, and I think most of my peers understand ourselves to be part of a world in conflict. So it really changed my worldview. And for me, as a person very committed to peace already, already working in that world, it was like, I need to get more invested in this message of, like, nonviolence and nonviolent social change that that’s really important right this minute. And nobody on my college campus was interested in that. And so the Cleveland Nonviolence Network was sort of forming out of folks already in the Near West side, people I already knew and had met in other contexts, but that’s when they were- They were starting to meet specifically on that issue, and I joined them, and that’s where I kind of got plugged in. So I already had, you know, met them because of the School of the Americas or the IRTF, other sorts of things. But this was when I sort of showed up as an adult member of the community and was like, what do we do? And put me to work. And I remember it because we had this meeting, and I showed up to the meeting. Somebody had sent me an email and was like, hey, you might be interested in this. I was like, well, I know a couple of these people. I’ve met them. I think I know where this is. I didn’t know where it was. Took me forever to find it. But I finally show up for this meeting, and I walk into the meeting, it’s at the Catholic Worker House. And I walk into this meeting, and they’re all. And they all look at me like, who is that? Or most of them didn’t know me. A couple did. But I was like, hi, I heard there’s a meeting. I want to help. And they’re like, great, we’re having an event next week. Can you help make the soup? I can help make the soup. So, like, I showed up the next week, and I started making the soup, and I’ve been making soup ever since, you know. [laughs] So this would have been 2001. It is now 2024. So for now 23 years, I have been making soup, and I had no idea how to make soup at the age of 21. So I showed up, and Maryellen Fiala was in the kitchen, and she said, here’s how we make soup. [laughs] So I make very good soup, because Maryellen taught me how when I was 21 years old. But that was how I first got connected with them, because I needed to be around people who saw this issue as being so sort of core and so as important as I did, and I didn’t have that among my peers at school, so. Yeah, yeah.
Bali White [00:23:54] So were you- Could you kind of talk about, like, the Peace Show, your involvement in that?
Megan Wilson-Reitz [00:24:00] I wasn’t terribly involved in the Peace Show. The Nonviolence Network was always involved with it. I never, I think when it first started, the first year of the Peace Show, I think I was already in Chile during my service year, and so when I got back, I just didn’t- That wasn’t a project I got super involved with. I always went to it, right? But I wasn’t involved in organizing it. But we were very involved in the Catholic Worker community in protesting the Air Show.
Bali White [00:24:31] Yes.
Megan Wilson-Reitz [00:24:31] And so I was always more involved with the Air Show protest than the Peace Show, and they ended up being kind of a combination of both.
Bali White [00:24:42] Talk a little bit about the Air Show, your protest against it?
Megan Wilson-Reitz [00:24:45] Yeah. So that the Air Show protest, for me, I think, has been really important, or at least, you know, was for a long time a big piece of how I understood myself working in the city because- Okay, so you’re already familiar with the Air Show protests. Probably. You’ve probably heard a little bit about it?
Bali White [00:25:06] I’ve heard some, yes.
Megan Wilson-Reitz [00:25:07] So there are a couple of pieces that make that particular protest really important to me. One is about personal relationship. So, you know, we had- And this was, this predates me, right? It’s the mid-eighties. We have people who are living in Cleveland, in the Catholic Worker community, who are refugees from Central America and other parts of the world where there’s a lot of war. And the sound of the jets is very triggering to people who have experienced violence in war. Right? It is not a fun thing. It is terrifying and traumatic. So people who were in relationship with the community who had experienced war were saying to us, right? - I use the “us” generally because I wasn’t there yet - but said to us, this is terrifying and traumatic. How can you support this? And we were like, we can’t, actually. You’re right. And so the protest actually came, was born out of this, like, empathy with understanding and walking with in solidarity with the people who were having this experience. And so I felt like that is a very- That’s a very deeply authentic reason to be committed to something. Right? We’re not protesting this because we don’t like it. I mean, we don’t like it, but we’re protesting it because it— Because the people who’ve experienced trauma have asked for a solidarity. Right? So for me, it’s important because of that. It’s also important because it’s a Cleveland thing. Right? Everybody in Cleveland loves the Air Show. We all love the air show. Big planes, boom, boom, boom, right? And there was, there’s this broad cultural acceptance of this thing. And so there was this small group of us going, this is awful. Does no one else see how awful this is? And so there’s a sense that, like, you’ve got to communicate that, right? Don’t you all see how awful this is? [laughs] So for me, it was also, like, part of being a Clevelander. Like, I felt like I needed to be a witness to my neighbors about this thing that I felt like I saw very clearly, and a few of us saw very clearly, but none of the rest of the world seemed to think it mattered. And so it was those- I think it was those two pieces, really, that drew me to that witness, which had been going on long before my time, right? And so I started participating in it. And when I was about 25, 26 years old, a group of us started talking about, hey, we should do a civil disobedience action inside the Air Show. And, you know, there were mixed reactions to that. But I think, you know, on the whole, the community kind of got together and said, yeah, we think this is a good idea. A civil disobedience would be cool. So we got. We got tickets, the Air Show, somewhere, somebody donated. I don’t even remember where we got tickets to the Air Show, but we got about a dozen tickets to the Air Show. And we went in with a group, and two of us did a sort of a public thing. You know, knelt in front of a, one of the bombers, and we had a banner, and, you know, we were forcibly ejected from the- [crosstalk] Probably have a photo of it. So it was just the two of us that first year, and then the second, we decided to do it again the second year. And that year there were five of us. And we did get arrested that time. We were, the first time we were forcibly objected, but the second time we all went to jail. And so, you know, like, that was a- That was very important for me. You know, it was very formative. Like, my parents were horrified. My mother said I was in a cult. You know, she’s like, why are you, what are you doing now? Okay, so remember, my mother teaches at Ursuline College, [crosstalk] She’s teaching at Ursuline College. She’s got all these Ursuline nuns. Well, a lot of the Ursuline nuns who she works with also were very involved with the School of the Americas and everything else because one of the Cleveland Ursuline sisters was one of the four churchwomen who were murdered in El Salvador in 1980. So they have this very long history of solidarity with Latin America and civil disobedience, even in protest of, you know, US foreign policy towards, especially El Salvador. So this is a longstanding part of the Cleveland Ursulines’ tradition. So my mother now works with the Cleveland Ursulines. She’s got all these really close friends who are Ursuline sisters. So she’s at work, you know, and she’s upset because her daughter’s going to jail or just got out of jail or something. It was like, around that time, and one of the sisters came to her office and they said, we heard that Megan got arrested. And my mom goes, yes. Do you believe it? And she goes, yes, we’re all so proud of her. [laughs] And my mother had this moment of cognitive dissonance. Like, she’s horrified that her kid is, you know, engaging in this, you know, completely radical behavior. And the sisters are like, she’s just marvelous, you know. [laughs] So, yeah, so, you know, the nuns are always the most radical people in the block. But anyway, so we- And as civil disobedience actions go, it was pretty mild, right? We did a thing. We got arrested, you know, paid bail a couple days later. Like, it was- It was not a thing we went to in front of the judge, and the judge was like, seriously, why am I dealing with these people? Right, And so most of us, it was just like, you’re a first time offender. Just forget you’re done. They didn’t even do anything. But there were a couple people who had done similar actions before, and they were like, they’re not first time offenders. They need to do something. And so the judge is like, [laughs] says to one of my co-defendants, she goes, I think you need to do some community service. And he’s like, she’s like, how about, like, I don’t know, 40 hours of community service? And he’s like, I do that before breakfast. Right? [laughs] So, like, you know, in the end, it was like people made a really big deal about, oh, Cleveland Catholic, the Cleveland Five, you know, the Peace Show Five or the Air Show Five. It was like, no, I mean, it was very minor, and we were a bunch of privileged White people. Like, we had the privilege to go and do that and not face major consequences, right? But it was important for me to say, I’m willing to put my freedom on the line to call attention to this thing. So, yeah, so the Peace Show was going on while all of that was also happening, and so we were all sort of working together on this collective. And I actually like that the Peace Show is happening. It’s sort of not happening anymore. But the years that it was happening was really great because it was like, there’s this group of us who are out here saying, this is bad, and this other group saying, and this is good. Right? This is the world we want, and this is the world we don’t. Right? And we were doing that at the same time. And I think sometimes in protest movements and social change movements, we’re very focused on what we don’t want. Right? This is bad. This is evil. This is unconscionable. This is, you know, this is a thing we cannot tolerate. And so you’re spending a lot of time standing against things. Right? We go- Like, we go and we protest racism, but, like, what does it mean to have a world where we don’t have racism? What does an anti-racist world, community look like? And are we building it? Are we working towards it? And so I think we’re not real good at that. So, you know, for me, the work of, like, we’re building and we’re building this while we’re tearing this down, and, you know, trying to do both of those, I think, was really important. So I missed the Peace Show. But it was a lot of work. It was a lot of work. And so the people who are doing it are like, yeah, if somebody’s isn’t gonna step up and run this thing, we’re nothing. And, like, who could blame them? Right?
Bali White [00:33:23] So you had mentioned that you took, like, a service trip to Chile. Can you talk a little bit about that and kind of what you were involved in?
Megan Wilson-Reitz [00:33:32] Yeah, I went as a volunteer with the Sisters of the Humility of Mary. So the Humility of Mary volunteer service program. Yeah, it does. Works with mostly, you know, recent new college graduates to do a year of service somewhere, mostly domestically. But for a few years, they sent people to Chile because they had a former sister who lived there, and actually, she had left the community and married, and then she and her husband were Marian missionaries, but she still had this connection with the Humility of Mary sisters. So they were like, we want to send you a volunteer. She was like, great, fine. So they sent- So I was actually the first year of their international program, which just lasted a few years, and so I did a year in Santiago. I was supposed to go to Santiago, and then I ended up- I got down there, they’re like, we’re gonna send you to a bunch of places, and then you pick the one you like and yo
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