• Local woman urges ripple effect of service

It’s been nearly a decade, but Julie Buckley remembers every detail. The clear, crisp midnight sky. The stillness, so much so she could hear the hooves of the horses in the snowy field adjacent Star Valley United Church in Thayne. It was yet another Christmas Eve, and Buckley was preparing food and gifts to help Santa Claus.

She kept thinking of what her pastor had been preaching throughout Advent. “You’ll find Jesus in a barn,” he told them.

“I’m not going to find Him in a barn, because I’m too busy doing these other things,” Buckley thought to herself during those sermons, thinking of all the yuletide work to be done through the local food bank and other Christmas tasks. “I don’t have time for a barn.”

So it was on that Christmas Eve, she was yet again making deliveries — sure she’d seen a red nose fly by. It’s below zero kind of cold. She was down to the last of some 13 visits and she found herself carrying packages, sneaking in the door of an outbuilding near a house, per the mother’s request.

“I open the door and sure enough I can smell the hay. I think I’m going in someone’s garage; I’m actually in the other half of a barn. And I can hear the animals. I can’t see because it’s pitch black, and I don’t want to turn the light on because I’m helping Santa Claus. But it was the smell. It was the hay. They were horses tucked in for the night. It was so quiet. It was a Star Valley crystal clear night.

“And I drove home and said, ‘He was right. Jesus was in a barn.’”

Such is just one way Julie Buckley speaks of her 45 years of “connecting” with the people of Star Valley — of being, as she describes it, the “in-between.”

“There came a point for me,” Buckley said, looking back, “to realize that I’m getting a little older and wiser and with working with people in need for many things, I came to figure out that I’m the in-between.

“When I say the in-between, it took me years to figure out that I get to see it in people’s eyes — for me to look into the eyes of people giving, trusting, and then for me to turn and see the eyes of those who receive. I’m the in-between person.”

For this gentle woman with long, silver hair, kindness isn’t a choice. It’s a way of life. And she only agreed to an interview with SVI Media in hopes of spreading that way of life. Sitting down with this reporter in the offices of Star Valley United Church, Buckley opened up with her usual candor. But even the interview got interrupted as she had to text “in-between” someone with a freezer to donate and someone who needed a freezer.

Recently, a woman commented to Buckley about her passion for the local food bank and other causes, such as her part in the Lincoln County Human Resources Council and as president of the council for Star Valley United Church. She was asked, “What drives you?”

One needs only to look back on Buckley’s life to see how those seeds were sown. Born in Caracas, Venezuela, where her father and grandfather worked on the Pan-American Highway, Buckley was later raised mainly in the U.S. Midwest, in Iowa City, Iowa. Her mother set the tone for her volunteerism. Seeing the need to get youth “out of the backseat and onto the dance floor,” her mother rallied “a little sleepy town in eastern Iowa” to get a youth center.

“My mom was an incredible role model. She taught me lessons about helping our neighbors,” Buckley related.

So as a preteen, she began her own venture by volunteering at the local Head Start program, a government program for children’s educational and nutritional needs. “Here I am, 12 years old, volunteering,” Buckley recalled. “I’d walk down to that little program in the summertime. I’d give of my time to help those little children.”

Then, in 1973, Buckley volunteered as a 16-year-old on the SS Hope, a hospital ship owned by Project HOPE which traveled the world dispensing medical services and knowledge. The young girl would celebrate her 17th birthday in Maceio, Brazil. Calling themselves “junior hopees,” the teenagers on the ship helped in a plethora of ways, including making leather straps for leg braces, cleaning out a local building to be made into a hospital and serving at a children’s nutrition’s center.

The memory most engrained in the teenager’s mind was of a little girl. Buckley had seen photos of starving children before — of little distended stomachs. She would pray and say, “Dear God, how could that happen to children anywhere?”

Then she met this little 18-month-old Brazilian child — “just absolutely bones and her little tummy was round. We’d all seen those posters [of starving children], and the next thing I knew I was holding that child in my lap.”

But after several weeks of coming to the center and being cared for by a teenage girl from Iowa, “it didn’t seem like her tummy was quite as distended. Even in a short time, two months, we could see some improvement.”

When asked about caring for your neighbor, Buckley said that memory stands out.

Then in 1979, she came to Afton, and later Etna, to teach school, fresh out of Utah State University. Her original plan, she related, was to teach school for one year then return to Utah State to finish her master’s degree, “then I’d be prepared to go out into the real world. The joke is 45 years later, I’m still here. [And] it turns out, I was in the real world,” she said, laughing. “I was attracted to the farming, the dairy and the agriculture. I liked the slow pace.”

She also found herself attracted to an airplane mechanic named Jack. They soon married and are parents to two children — Whitney and William.

As at other times in her life, Buckley threw herself into community service, working not only in the schools, but also in the local Head Start program, on the founding council of Star Valley United Church and with the food bank, the latter originally a Boy Scout project that filled three shelves in a closet of the church.

Today, that food bank is at the community center in Thayne and is recognized by the state of Wyoming. Buckley also serves with her church as they support First Lady Jennie Gordon’s Wyoming Hunger Initiative by allowing space for gardens that support the food bank.

For Buckley, the conversation always comes back around to the eyes. She said she’ll never forget one Christmas about 10 years ago. She was, again, late at the church on Christmas Eve waiting to share gifts and yuletide cheer when a father arrived. “I handed him those gifts, and the tears just poured out of his eyes.”

Perhaps she recalled the eyes of that little girl in Brazil. “I can still see her eyes,” Buckley recalled, smiling. “It’s one thing with hands and hearts, but I figured out it’s actually the eyes.”

Especially in one’s own home, she emphasized, where service begins. Buckley recalled one Thanksgiving when she was busy making pies for the community and her son stood at the kitchen table watching. “Is one of the these for us?” he asked.

“That was the kicker,” Buckley related, with some emotion. “That woke me up and reminded me because there’s only so much of you to give out. You also have to take care of yourself and your own.”

However, calling it the “ripple effect,” she said if everyone gives just a little, it ripples outward through a community — and perhaps the world.

“Why ought we to be kind?” she asked, replying to a question from this reporter. “For me, it’s part of being human.”