Stereotypes busted -and confirmed

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Up early to be back in Neu-Halbstadt in time for the day’s tour, supposedly starting at 7 a.m. Our hosts fed us a full breakfast of buns with (guava!) jam, wild honey, cold meat and cheese, and tea. We were sent off on the bus to Menno Colony, where Walter Ratzlaff, a former mayor of the town, gave us an illuminating view of life in the oldest colony; the highly conservative one that left Manitoba in the 1920s over disputes with the government on education just as my own family was gratefully fleeing to Canada! Though he disavowed Jeff’s view that this was Christian socialism in action, his picture of the governance of the colony certainly reviewed an amazingly effective form of communalism, complete with a taxation system that covers the schools, health care, insurance, roads, social services and pretty much everything else, including the taxes the colony (which holds title to the land) pays to the government of Paraguay. Since there’s no income tax in Paraguay - just sales and land taxes - this makes the colony by far the primary pocket in the lives of these folks. This is all handled by a governing council of six people, elected by colony members from the 12 districts through what’s essentially a word of mouth campaign. The civil cooperative’s budget is $12 million to look after the needs of 8800 people, all of them German-speaking Mennonites. Of that, social services is a tiny fraction - about 3% - and even at that, Ratzlaff said, people complain about the expense.

Ratzlaff was a fascinating guy, obviously a reform-minded man but also aware of the dangers of progressing too fast; one who thinks revitalization of the colony has to go hand in hand with real faith rather than just mindless conservation of traditions. Pushing for generous social services, for example, he tries to educate people on the needs and the Christian obligation of those who have much to help those who don’t. On the other hand, asked about why some people in the colony are poor and others rich, Ratzlaff put this down to some not working as hard as others, and not valuing education enough - people who have no books in their homes, don’t encourage their kids’ education etc., and pass on poverty to the next generation. He got one German woman into a little bit of a lather when he mentioned Jesus’ saying that “the poor you will always have with you.” No, she retorted, Jesus said that’s because you don’t obey God’s commandments. Hmmm.

There’s an interesting irony particularly in how the colonies seem to interact with the “Indians,” most of whom have entered this area from “the bush” near or beyond the Argentina border, seeking an improved way of life from a vanishing hunter-gatherer culture. Ratzlaff feels it’s important that Mennonites learn the lessons of history from the Russian experience, where failure to consider the needs of the poor peasants around them, while growing rich themselves, doomed the Mennonites to be friendless when the Bolsheviks decided to disenfranchise them. They have done much to uplift the native people (and we expect to learn more about that tomorrow), but for us North Americans and Europeans there’s always an edge of paternalism about the attitude, and a bit of cringing about the kind of friendly apartheid the colony system encourages. Non-Mennonites basically aren’t welcome to become members of Menno colony, and non-members aren’t allowed to live within the colony, though there are plenty working in its factories and on its farms. Asked about intermarriage, he seemed hard-pressed to imagine how people of such different cultures could possibly manage a life together. The church minister who was sitting in on the congregation mentioned two Mennonite women who had married Latino men - who became members by virtue of marriage, but never showed up at church.

The same problem with nomenclature arises in Mennonites here as it does in Canada - namely how to distinguish the cultural Mennonite from the faith Mennonite; in Paraguay, though there are Hispanic and native Mennonite churches, most of them are reluctant to call themselves Mennonite in public because it connotes a certain ethnicity - though as one outsider was quoted as saying, a particular economic system. Ratzlaff wishes Mennonite could be reserved for the faith, though he recognizes that’s simply not yet common parlance.

He told an interesting story later about mediating a dispute when a boy with long hair was told he couldn't play in the inter-colony volleyball tournament, and the boy's father made some unruly comments about the ultra-conservative faction that was insisting on this. Ratzlaff, while complaining about people who focus so much on outward appearance -- "all this nonsense" -- nevertheless pointed out that the father was also in the wrong for his terrible comments. His solution, imposed in his role of mayor, was a face-saving prohibition on the boy's playing in that particular game, but quietly allowing him to play the rest of the tournament.

The women cringed a bit when he said, in response to a question, that there was no rule against women being part of the ruling group, but no one has so served; the one woman who ran a few years back got no support, including from the women (who DO have a vote). Many women, he said, would never vote for a woman because men have always been the smart ones, the strong ones …

After a session in the community room, we walked down the street in what was now a full-blown dust storm, the sand stinging our eyes, to the old cemetery, where Martin Friesen - “the Moses of the Menno colony:” - is buried. The dedication of the first church here, in 1930, was accompanied by the sound of gunfire from the Chaco War in the distance! Then we visited the altenheim, where they're building condominiums to help subsidize the cost of running the place. Besides a nursing unit, there are 50 individual homes in the complex, with medical help provided as needed. The colony is facing up to demographic changes that will mean that by 2025 they'll have 2,000 seniors. Oddly, to my mind, Ratzlaff said families want their parents to go into the home because there are jealousies over who gets to take care of mom and dad (and possibly get favoured in the will) and this is a way of keeping peace in the family!

We spent some time in the colony supermarket - pretty much like any except for the dearth of unseasonal veggies - where Jeff bought more dulce de leche products. This is getting to be a theme ...

Then it was off to the dairy operation, under the trade name Trebol (clover), after the name of a police station that had been in the area when it was created. Pretty amazing to hear that Mennos produce 80% of paraguay's dairy products, and 20% of its beef -- beef being a major product in this seriously meat-eating culture. We saw the production line where they were sterilizing and Tetra-packing 6000 cartons of milk per hour.

We visited the colony's little museum, and picked up a T-shirt for Chris in their souvenir shop, while admiring but ultimately not buying an addition to our guampa collection.

After lunch -- again, a buffet, menu service seemingly unknown in this area -- we were off to Fernheim Colony and the official municipal capital of Boqueron Department, Filadelfia.

Gati Harder, a woman in charge of tourism for this colony, greeted us in their community music room -- set up with a drum kit and bongos! -- and offered some intersting background, including how the government decided to foist the capital designation on the town in 1993. The Chaco is 60% of Paraguay's land, but holds only 2% of its population. It was originally all low thorn forest, with savannahs (or campos), and extremely sandy soil. The villages were set up in areas that had already been open. After years of poverty, trying to do agriculture, the opening of the Trans-Chaco road finally opened the way to the one thing that proved profitable: cattle ranching. After clearing the forest, cattle do well on mostly native grasses, although some grass is also planted. The government, trying to do something ecologically, is now insisting that 50% of all such land has to be left forested, which means that some of the farms need to be reforested. (Nicoleta told us later that some farms she knows of have no trees whatever!)

Water is a big problem; many of the wells originally dug by hand proved too salty to use. Filadelfia was founded on that spot because it has a good groundwater supply. Everyone hereabouts harvests rainwater in cisterns, though those with good wells are in much better state when a drought occurs like the one they're experiencing now. Ranchers dig big holes in the clay and create high tanks where water can run to the cattle without piping. Now they're bringing water from 25 km away, and investing in desalination equipment from Germany to make better use of those salty wells. The government promised a viaduct from the Rio Paraguay 15 years ago, and nothing's happened. These folks don't expect much from such promises!

We were told about some of the interesting flora of the region, including the quebracho tree -- the ax-breaker, and the original reason ports were built on the river, since the tree proved valuable for its tannin. Carlos Casado owned 5.6 million hectares, part of which were sold to the Mennonite colonizers, and built a small railroad to his lands -- but the pioneers still had to travel the last 100 km by oxcart. And that was the only way to get things to market until the highway was done in 1960.

The palosanto tree is another interesting specimen; it has beautifully scented greenish wood that doesn't rot and was used in carvings and fenceposts, as well as incense.

The bottle tree stores water in its bulbous trunk, which was soft enough to be carved out easily for use in coffins during the typhoid epidemic that killed 83 of the original Mennonite settlers. Soldiers in the Chaco War used them as lookout posts. They also provide food for animals during a drought.

Fernheim was established 1929-30 by people escaping Russia. Some 130,000 applied to leave; 5,677 were permitted to. (Some 30000 Germanic Mennonites live in paraguay now, half in Chaco; counting more recent converts, there are 60000 in the country.) The first to arrive suffered the cahco war, drought, locusts and bird plagues; some left for better land in East Paraguay.

Fernheim was the first colony to create a coop (in May 1931), whereby all buying and selling would be done as a group. Originally, members had to work for the colony 30 days per year, building its roads, schools, hospital and churches. It now has 1,800 shareholders, living in 25 villages (dorf), with 5 to 20 families in each, doing agriculture, dairy and cattle. They must be members of the cooperative to live there, but not necessarily church members. Many people also buy additional land outside the colony, which belongs to them personally rather than the collective.

They live by Law 514, established in 1921, which gave Mennonites (immigrant and descendants) religious freedom, the right to private schools, exemption from military service (since extended to all COs), release from swearing oaths.

The coop established the Frigochaco brand in 2001, a slaughtering house and hide-tanning operation. Their cattle are often a cross between Angus and Zebu, the bony-looking brahman-type cattle we've been seeing ever since we entered paraguay.

But cotton was the first crop - one abandoned altogether as of last year. Mechanization in the 1970s helped the colony come out of poverty. The big crops now are peanuts, sesame and gatton-panic (pasture seed). They also have a dairy co-op in cooperation with Neuland colony, under the Co-Op brand.

Her organizational chart of the Fernheim colony was pretty amazing -- it also supervises the bookstore, mechanic, a transport fleet, hotel, pharmacy, experimental farm and the industrial plant that processes peanuts and other goods. It provides technical assistance to ranchers, and markets beef to places like Russia and Chile. It runs a social work department, traffic police, and hospital; provides insurance to members, maintains 300 km of roads, 5 elementary schools and 1 secondary school, and a hospital that's open to everyone -- about half of patients are non-members of the colony. Paraguay doesn't have an income tax, but the colony handles land tax and also collects sales taxes. Five colonies share a teachers college, churning out teachers who can teach anywhere in the country in Spanish or German. They also have a psychiatric hospital that offers help with family therapy, addictions, depression and the like, a vocational school that includes nursing, and a home economics school that, shockingly, includes two boys. Co-op members pay about 10 to 15 percent of their income for all this!

Next we went to the industrial plant, where we saw how peanuts are processed for market; the drought has meant a very bad year for peanut farmers and workers in this plant, who are down to one shift from three last year -- meaning only about 50 workers versus 150-200 before. Interesting that the best of the crop always goes to export, while South America gets no. 2s (lower grades go for oil production and pet food).

In the little museum in the industrial plant, apparently fitted out with english labels in addition to the Spanish/German there just before MWC brought a ton of tourists, we got a chance to see the interesting products and seeds produced in the colony, including sorghum, feed con, sesame, castor beans and cotton. One of the native groups apparently produces charcoal for grills, and exports it to Europe and Canada, with assistance from the Mennonites.

After this whirlwind day in the dust storm, we were glad to get back to our host family and wash the grit out of our pores! We had a delightful multilingual meal with our hosts (including beef milanese, as they say here, and lots of welcome veggies), we went to the Neuland church for an evening service that included comments from each of the five countries represented in our bus group, singing by a Nivacle quartet with guitars, and some very nice comments about the world conference from the pastor, who thoughtfully translated each of his comments into English for our sake. Tom Yoder Neufeld got up and did the same for many of the German speakers. But my favourite moment was when the Ukrainian girl (who had showed up the first day in holey designer jeans, making me wonder what these folks would make of her!) spoke in Russian and was translated by an ancient bow-legged lady in a kerchief! That was a picture.

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