Over the last thirty years, many of my closest friends have encouraged me to write a book about my life, especially my experience in Peoples Temple. For the first twenty years after November 18, 1978, I was still recovering and rebuilding my life from scratch. After all, I had returned from Guyana after losing 918 friends and family, and I was about ready to join them. Besides being penniless, I was in debt to the U.S. government to repay my passage back from Guyana. In late 1978 and 1979, I gradually, day by day, started investing in my new life. I got a job, went to school at night, and aggressively pursued the therapy I knew I needed. I moved into Synanon, a residential drug treatment community. Drugs had never been a necessary part of my life, but the conversation and nurturing I got there kept me going and made me stronger. It was then that friends began telling me I should write a book.<\/p>\n
I couldn\u2019t do it. I knew that revisiting the trauma wasn\u2019t something I was ready for yet.<\/p>\n
Synanon folded around 1990, after I had lived there for ten years. By that time, my husband and I had adopted our wonderful son, and my life was back on track. I continued going to school at night and working during the day. I earned my credential and started teaching in public schools in 1994. For the next few years, raising my son and teaching took all of my concentration. No one I had met over the years, other than friends at Synanon, ever knew about my involvement with Peoples Temple.<\/p>\n
On the twentieth anniversary of the deaths in Jonestown in 1998, I attended the Evergreen Cemetery ceremony for the first time. Since then, my renewed friendship with the other survivors has become a huge part of my life. We shared a common experience so tragic that it is amazing that we survived. We feel safe together and we can finally feel lucky. That process took a long time.<\/p>\n
The book describes, not only the stories of my survival, but the experiences I shared with so many other people \u2013 most of whom are now dead \u2013\u00a0during my years in Peoples Temple. As I describe some of these with new and old friends, they are amazed. They only know one kernel of the whole. I am moved to tell them, \u201cAnd, that\u2019s not the half of it.\u201d Finally, after all these years, I can take the time and energy to do it, and do it correctly. I am in the all-consuming, endless process of writing my book, my whole story. Not surprisingly, it\u2019s entitled And That Ain\u2019t the Half of It<\/em>. <\/span><\/p>\n Since finishing that part of the book, I felt haunted that I hadn\u2019t done enough to recollect about my many dear friends who died in Jonestown.\u00a0 I wanted to do more to put faces on them \u2013 to humanize them, and in doing so, to honor them.\u00a0 I am putting the finishing touches on Part II within the same book, entitled Seeing the Faces.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n (Laura Johnston Kohl<\/strong>, who had lived in Jonestown but was working in Georgetown on 18 November, died on 19 November 2019 after a long battle with cancer. She was 72. Her writings for this website appear here<\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Over the last thirty years, many of my closest friends have encouraged me to write a book about my life, especially my experience in Peoples Temple. For the first twenty years after November 18, 1978, I was still recovering and rebuilding my life from scratch. After all, I had returned from Guyana after losing 918 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"parent":31469,"menu_order":5,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-31406","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/31406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31406"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/31406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":93449,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/31406\/revisions\/93449"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/31469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}