By Chuck Fager -- Autumn 2002

"I’ll get that," says Lenore Yarger, when the phone rings a few minutes into our conversation.

Its ringing interrupts us again a little later.

The phone in question is the GI Rights Hotline (1-800-394-9544), and it’s a typical day for Lenore and her husband Steve Woolford. Between them they answer most of the GI calls for counseling that come to Quaker House.

In 2001, that phone rang 3128 times. In 2002, it was 4067. For 2003, we don't have final figures yet; as of the end of November the tally was 5500. That's close to a doubling of the call load in two years!

Central as they are to the Quaker House mission, Steve & Lenore don’t live here. Modern telecommunications make it unnecessary. But their lives are also about more than this ringing phone. They live at the Silk Hope Catholic Worker, about 60-plus miles away. There they offer hospitality to homeless women and children, grow a large garden, and are active in various peace protests.

The radical pacifist Catholic Worker (CW) movement has been important to them since their college days in the late 1980s. At Duke, Lenore was very moved by Dorothy Day’s memoir, The Long Loneliness. At Notre Dame, Steve caught the bug during a summer at a CW house in Illinois. This common interest led them to a CW-related house–and each other–in Phoenix Arizona, in the early 1990s.

In 1997 they came to Durham, NC, to be nearer their families, and hoping to start a CW house of their own. "We wanted something big enough to offer hospitality," Lenore says, "but also rural enough so we could do a large garden."

"And we needed to be able to afford it," Steve adds. Silk Hope, in an area beset by the collapse of the Carolina textile industry, fit the bill.

While in Durham, though, they often attended the Friends Meeting there. "We’re Catholics," Steve notes, "but with a fondness for the Quaker way of worship." Lenore adds, "We’ve met lots of Quakers through various peace actions." In one such action Lenore got arrested at Ft. Bragg. And maybe, she muses, it was this that moved Durham Meeting to ask her to be their representative on the Quaker House board.

Lenore was drawn to Quaker House, but found GI counseling more compelling than Board work. "Usually I was on the other side of the fence from the GIs, at protests," Lenore says, "but I wanted to have a positive form of contact too. So many GIs are victims of military culture, and they’re desperate for helpful contact with someone on the outside."

Steve agrees: "It’s important to fight injustice in the abstract. But when you can also connect that to an individual human being, and help them out, it’s very rewarding."

In late 2000, Quaker House Director Phil Esmonde left to return to peace work in Sri Lanka. Lenore and Steve volunteered to keep up with the counseling. But calls kept increasing, and soon were more than they could handle part-time. That December, they asked the Board to put them on contract, to share the counseling load from Silk Hope. The Board agreed, pending the hiring of a new Director.

But that search lasted more than a year. As it continued, Steve & Lenore answered hundreds of calls. Along the way they gained a familiarity with arcane military regulations and procedures that’s rare in this field.