PERRYVILLE — Seven years ago, Joan Leland moved halfway across the country to Arkansas after a lifetime in Massachusetts, just so she could start volunteering at Heifer Ranch.
That’s testimony to the stellar reputation of Heifer International - and to the intrepid spirit of Leland. Now a vigorous 77-year-old, the former New Englander continues to volunteer at the ranch outside Perryville as well as Heifer Village on the Heifer International Campus in Little Rock.
“About three weeks after I made the decision to come down here, I began feeling like myself again when I was in my early 20s,” she says. “Volunteering with Heifer helps keep me feeling young. One of the nicest things about working at the ranch is mixing with the twentysomething volunteers. They treat us older folks just like real people. They have such good hearts, and they’re idealistic.”
During a career that included work as ateacher, librarian and private genealogical researcher, Leland became familiar with the Heifer-operated Overlook Farm in Rutland, Mass., near her home in the Bridgewater area.
“I had been connected with Heifer in Massachusetts since my late teens,” she says. “But all I really knew about Heifer’s headquarters in Arkansas was what I’d read in their World Ark magazine. And you can imagine the image a New Englander of my age would have had of Arkansas and Little Rock - 1957 and the segregationist mobs and Orval Faubus.”
After Leland’s husband died a decade ago, “Several things in my life came to points of discomfort, and I began to think of moving on to something else. But I didn’t know where or what.”
Then, as she remembers it, “On May 7, 2002, I woke up at 1:45 a.m. with these words in my head: ‘What about Little Rock and Heifer?’ That’s the only time God has ever spoken to me in actual words!
“I went straight to my computer and scoped out Realtors, hardly able to wait until 9 a.m. when I could call and set up an interview. I came down the next week, while my unsuspecting son and daughter-in-law were on their Bahamas honeymoon. And I’ve never looked back.”
Leland now volunteers one day a week working on Heifer Ranch’s landscape gardening. She concentrates on the ranch’s St. Francis Garden, while also guiding the landscaping efforts of one full-time volunteer and many part timers from Heifer’s seasonal education programs. In Little Rock, she volunteers most Saturday mornings doing tours of the green building, wetlands and exhibits inside Heifer Village.
Since moving to Arkansas, she has gone on four Heifer study trips, including one to Romania. She is impressed by the global reach of the venerable nonprofit organization, which aims to ease hunger and poverty around the world by providing gifts of livestock and plants along with education in sustainable agriculture to communities in need.
Leland is also active at St. Paul United Methodist Church in Little Rock as volunteer leader of the congregation’s “green team.” As she describes it, “we’re caring for creation, reflecting that we recognize a spiritual as well as a societal responsibility in our environmental efforts.”
When she moved to Arkansas, “Family and friends would ask me, ‘How long areyou going to stay?’ I’d say, ‘Two or three years.’”
Now it has been seven years, “and I really feel like an Arkansan.”
She has no immediate plans to end her work with Heifer, which has an increased need for volunteers after last year’slayoffs of paid staff members in an economic squeeze.
“I told my kids that I’d come back to Massachusetts when I couldn’t drive anymore,” she says. “So far, that’s not a problem” - adding with a grin, “But maybe the police have got their eye on me. They did catch me in a speed trap.”
That same twinkling sense of humor is manifest in the separate name tags Leland wears at the two Heifer locations.
“In Little Rock, I’m ‘Joan,’” she explains. “But at HeiferRanch, I’m ‘Joanelle.’ When I started volunteering there, they told me there was another Joan, so I’d have to be ‘Joan L.’ That seemed a little silly, so I turned it into a new first name, ‘Joanelle.’” Anyone interested in being considered for volunteer duty at Heifer Ranch outside Perryville or the Heifer International Campusin Little Rock can inquire online at
heifer.org
or call (501) 889-5124 for Heifer Ranch, (800) 422-0474 for Heifer’s Little Rock facilities.
High Profile, Pages 41 on 06/27/2010