The Burgeoning Jonestown Bookshelf, part 2

(Extract of a conversation with Laura Johnston Kohl and Jordan Vilchez, Guyana, March 2018, both are Jonestown survivors. Kohl has already published one book on Jonestown with another forthcoming while Vilchez is preparing two books on the subject for young adults.
Part 1 was published in April of this year; the opening remark is shown here in italic.)
PP No one book can account for a people’s history. Parts of our history are still stored in diaries and memoires and in foreign archives. However, sometimes we are fortunate to have people who are still alive and in our midst and to whom we can turn to fill in the gaps. So it is with great satisfaction to meet both of you who are survivors of Jonestown.
Much of what we know about Jonestown came to us in various formats – books, films, social media. But there are missing pieces. I was not there, you were…let’s talk about [Jonestown].
LJK The Jonestown Institute – ‘Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple’- is the most profound source of information about the Peoples Temple and Jonestown – they put out an annual newsletter and many times the people who do research, the people who travelled to Jonestown – authors and survivors all write for this newspaper. What I did this year I talk to the editor saying I’d like to reach out and get a Guyanese point of view so I wrote a request for Guyanese to contact me and I said we would like to print some of your reflections and questions in the Jonestown Report where it belongs, your perspective belongs there – you are not a neutral party, you were very much involved by being neighbours. And it was almost as if people were waiting for the chance to share. So they wrote everyday and I would get ten, fifteen, twenty responses so I would ask of them to elaborate so the Jonestown Report would have a Guyanese perspective; I brought some and shared it with the National Library.
Some people wrote 500 words about their experience and a lot of people just wrote a paragraph but who had something significant to say. So it is just a beginning just like this trip is the beginning of having oral communication that was the beginning of having contact that we could do back and forth; not just a hit and you move on but a back and forth dialogue. So that is what I am really interested in.
PP Where did it all start [for you, Jordan]?
JV What?
PP Your attachment to Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple.
JV Well, a friend of our family told me about the Temple….
PP First, locate the Temple….
JV The Temple was located in Northern California in the Redwood Valley and we were living two hours south which was called the Bay area across from San Francisco – the East Bay. Our family friend had gone to the Temple up north and liked what she saw; what she saw was all races of people in a building singing, talking about social justice issues, serious about making positive change. She encouraged us to go – my mother, my brother, my sisters, my sisters’ children piled into the car and drove up to Redwood Valley and attended a meeting and we were very impressed. So my sister who was older than I decided to move up there; at that time I was twelve and so my mother decided it would be a good idea for me to move too because this was a community and it was a very supportive community, anything you needed you could get; if you needed community support, you could get that, if you needed clothing, you could get that, whatever you needed, it could be provided….
PP So it met all your needs….
JV So I moved up there, went to school and we had meetings every Wednesday and on weekends the church was more like a community centre with a pool at the back so after the meetings on the weekends we would swim particularly the young people and children.
For a young person who didn’t have many friends because my mother would travel back and forth to Mexico after her divorce from my father; I didn’t have many friends and here instantly I had so many awesome good friends who welcomed me as a newcomer to the community. And so I moved in with my sister and we got to know the people of the temple. It wasn’t long after that that I moved into a commune and another and then another commune. The highest form of loyalty was to go communal which meant you would give up everything – if you had a job, you would turn in your entire pay cheque. I didn’t work, I went to school but I gave all my time and extra time and creativity and, you know, all of myself. And what I learnt in the Temple was that I was only of value to the extent that I could be of service. While that was good in its own right….
PP Did this not bother you?
JV While that was good in its own right, it was not good for me developmentally because there was no focus on the individual. The focus was on the cause and what that did was it diminished me and everyone else as an individual. I grew up believing that I need to dedicate myself to the cause – the cause been social justice and equality, all of these noble good things.
It wasn’t too long after that, a few years, we started travelling down south to San Francisco and Los Angeles going back and forth in Greyhound buses between these two cities; for the most part, we sort of abandoned the valley area where we started out in.
I was in the temple in San Francisco communally as well then in a day’s notice in 1976, the summer of ‘76, I was told I was going to Guyana the next day….
(to be continued)
Responses to this author telephone (592) 226-0065 or email: oraltradition2002@yahoo.com (Times Sunday Magazine)