Reverend Jakob Vetsch is middle-aged and arrived only a few years ago in his new parish, in the green neighborhood to the left and right of Hofwiesenstrasse in Zurich. Behind the neat rows of terraced houses, the DRS studio juts out from the trees. Jakob Vetsch praises the new arrival site as a hidden biotope of plants, trees and meadows. More than that, "It's a biotope (living place) of countless origins from all over Swiss rural regions." Most of the families in his community immigrated in the fifties, sixties and seventies. Discovering this diversity in pastoral work is fascinating and contradicts the common image of uniformity in the city.
Jakob Vetsch first moved away from his place of origin, the area of Buchs SG, when he was a cantonal school student. After a year at the Sargans Cantonal School, he transferred to the St. Gallen Cantonal School as a result of his father's election to the government. He experienced it more pragmatically as an educational institution and less as a formative city: "Here, at that time, you had the feeling that everything was somehow finished and finally ordered."
His favorite image of himself is the one taken at a press conference in Hanover, when the virtual pastoral care project was presented by means of the homepage.
As a student at the business high school in St. Gallen, his origin turned into its search: "Thanks to a well-known philosophy teacher, one day I felt: I have to change, from now on I will study theology, Latin, Greek and Hebrew in the so completely different, open city of Basel, where Erasmus is still noticeable!" But here, too, the primordial hue of origin made itself known: "At shop windows with tourist posters of lofty Alpine images, I sometimes had to stop and knew I had to return to this landscape."
He worked at Klosters-Serneus GR in Prättigau in the then still quite closed, narrow valley community. He was drawn back to Werdenberg: "Yes, this expanse of the valley!" From here he moved to his now-home in Zurich. The memory of his origins remains his life plan: "I still have my vacation home in Gretschins, in the Werdenberg, and when I would be back there, a garret in the city would have to remain."
The philosophy teacher in St. Gallen had precursors in his school days in Buchs. Here Jakob Vetsch became acquainted with "previrtual" traveling: The storytelling of teachers in class about ways of the Romans from history, later Karl May with his descriptions of landscapes he had never seen. The inner travel into the distance from a safe, familiar and consciousness strengthening origin, which the Werdenberg offered, did not let him go. The thread connects to virtual travel as a very modern means of giving meaning to and accompanying origin and arrival in life. Recently, his son asked him if he could spend a few days with his fiancée in their second home in Werdenberg. Do original tones pass from one generation to the next, what changes in the process and what remains?
In conversation with Jakob Vetsch, one senses the new wind, the acceleration of the possibilities of developing a home. The labor emigration to Zurich follows the period of "educational migrations" to St. Gallen or Basel. A new place is not definite, but temporary. The puzzles become multi-digit and reach from Werdenberg to Prättigau, back to Gretschins and to Zurich. A roof remains in the city in case one returns: multiple places of residence and the simultaneity of the puzzles become a desire. Virtual, international communication is added: the sense-home (german: Sinnheimat) is possible worldwide via the Internet.
A puzzle without end? In conversation, continuity becomes apparent: the home of origin, the Werdenberg, remains "anchorage" in the memory, even if one appears in Hanover or in Budapest at a press conference. The security and the solid ground in the first home (imprints by teachers, a strong, good environment) are the best prerequisite to go out again and again and also to dare jumps into the unknown.

Based on an article by Dr. Hans-Peter Meier-Dallach in the Werdenberger Jahrbuch 2002 (pages 20/21), Verlag BuchsMedien, Buchs SG, Switzerland.