Mennonite Weekly Review

HARRISONBURG, Va. — Rose Shenk, 41, is a widow with four boys between 5 and 11 years old.

From left, Jacob and Andrew Stoltzfus, Rose Shenk, Christian and Daniel Stoltzfus and Bruce Buckwalter are beginning a journey together. — Photo by Jim Bishop

Bruce Buckwalter, 40, is single and never been married. Credit Facebook, the social networking Web site, with bringing them together.

Though their paths had crossed several times over the years, neither expected that one day they might experience an urge to merge.

Shenk spent her early years in East Africa, the daughter of long-term missionaries Joseph and Edith Shenk.

Buckwalter, the second oldest of four sons of Bob and Betty Lou Buckwalter, most recently of Tok, Alaska, caught his parents’ zest for adventure, which took the family to church-related assignments in several African nations.

Shenk graduated from Eastern Mennonite University in 1990 and did voluntary service work in the Bronx, N.Y., for two years, then worked as a nanny for a year. She earned a teaching certificate from James Madison University and then taught at Belle­ville (Pa.) Mennonite School.

She married Reuben Stoltzfus in 1995 and moved to Charlottesville, where he was in medical school. They moved on to Iowa City, Iowa, for him to pursue medical residencies in child and adult psychiatry while she taught English and drama at Iowa Mennonite School. Three of their four children were born in Iowa.

Buckwalter freely admits to having a heavy dose of wanderlust. His present job, logistics manager at Dynamic Aviation in Bridgewater, is a natural extension of his longtime flight plan of pursuing things he’s always wanted to do, then purchasing a ticket to a new venture in some other corner of the world.

Before moving to Harrisonburg in 2004, Buckwalter did logistics work for a medical relief non-government agency in Sudan. He did gypsy moth research for the state of Virginia after graduating from EMU in 1991 and then followed the wheat harvest out west. He’s worked for Partners Excavating in Harrisonburg and spent two years working at a homeless shelter in Alaska.

In 2004 Shenk’s family moved from Iowa back to Charlottesville for Reuben Stoltzfus to pursue postdoctoral work in forensic psychiatry.