Menno Moto

by Cameron Dueck

  Instead, it has a distinctly British colonial air—it used to be called the British Honduras—and is still the only country in Central America whose official language is English. It is far less densely populated than most of its neighbours and is generous with parks and reserves. Most visitors come for diving and beaches—it is the home of the Great Blue Hole.

  I entered the country at its northern border with Mexico, and immediately noticed that Belize also felt poorer, more ramshackle and disorganized than Mexico. Every fuel station I stopped at had broken pumps, so I filled my motorcycle from plastic cans sold beside the road. Houses standing on tall spindly legs to protect them from floods and bugs were clad in rusting tin and scraps of wood. Men, women, and children lounged on front stoops, watching the world go by. Everyone appeared to be waiting for something, and it looked as though they’d already waited for a long time.

  Belize consistently has one of the top ten national homicide rates in the world, and as I rode through the country it was on track to set a new record for murders in one year, at 145. That in a country with a population of only 335,000.

  I rode south through flat countryside, past shaggy banana fields. The roads were empty save for the occasional battered car that limped along like a crooked dog. Fly-covered donkeys pulled rickety carts in the heat. I passed the turnoff for Belize City, which was on the coast to my left, and instead turned west, towards the Guatemalan border.

  Nearly every person I’ve met that has visited Belize remembers the same incongruous feature about the country.

  “We were on a tour bus, they had the reggae music cranked, and then we stopped and picked up these people dressed in old-fashioned clothes. The men had long beards.”

  “I was going to a rainforest hike and we passed this village full of rich white people. Are those the Mennonites?”

  Yes, they are. The colony of Spanish Lookout, the largest of numerous colonies in Belize, is nestled in the hills right on the Guatemalan border. As I approached the colony the road became smoother and the fields on either side of it were covered in richer, greener crops and hay than elsewhere. The farms, when they appeared over a small rise, were orderly. Tall palm trees shaded the yards, and shiny red and yellow farm implements were parked in neat lines.

  It was early afternoon as I rode into the heart of Spanish Lookout and drove down Center Road, past construction businesses, small factories producing farm machinery, an insurance office. The Farmers Trading Center housed a bank and the colony’s largest store and its parking lot was full of late-model pickup trucks. I parked my bike and entered the Golden Corral, a rustic family diner, where a blond waitress greeted me in Plautdietsch. I ordered glomms veranke and foarmaworscht, everything fried, like my mom used to make. The tangy cottage cheese inside the doughy veranke contrasted with the salty smokiness of the sausage so well that for a few moments I was carried away to our family dining table decades past. I only looked up once I had wiped the last of the gravy from the plate with a slice of bread. A ruddy-faced man at the next table was watching me. I introduced myself, making an extra wipe at my mouth in case any gravy had escaped.

  “I’m looking for a guy named Klaas Friesen,” I said. “My uncle in Canada gave me his name. Do you know where he lives?”

  My Plautdietsch, although marginally improved after a few weeks in the Mexican colonies, still contained a distinct accent that didn’t belong here. It didn’t belong anywhere, really.

  “I sure do!” he said, laughing. “That’s my dad.”

  A few minutes later I pulled up to a farmhouse, where, on a shady porch, Klaas and his wife Greta sat chatting with a few others.

  “I have a Mennonite from Canada here,” their son said in a booming voice as he led me to the porch.

  “You have to tell me your pa’s name, then we will really know who you are,” Klaas prodded as I settled into a seat.

  I told him.

  “Ahh, Leonard and Linda Dueck, we know them well.”

  I instantly felt at home, here in the sticky Belizean heat, two months’ journey from where I’d grown up.

  Greta was a large woman who moved with difficulty. She wore a blue flowered dress, thick glasses, her long grey hair pulled back into a ponytail. She had a wide toothy smile and she cackled with delighted laughter. Klaas was tall, lean, and loose jointed, wearing a floppy sun hat. He reminded me of my long-gone Grandpa Friesen, with a quick grin and a constant stream of corny jokes. Like Grandpa, he was painfully honest and sincere, which could come across as crudeness but was driven by a kind heart.

  “Well, that was before my experience,” Klaas was saying.

  “Before what?” I asked.

  “I had an experience once, it was hard, but I became a new man. I thought I was dead, but Jesus brought me back to life.”

  Klaas could see he had me hooked.

  “Ya, life has never been the same,” Greta added.

  Klaas had fallen silent. He was staring at his shoe.

  “I’ll tell you about it another day,” he said. “I’ll take you to where it happened.”

  Now I had to stay.

  “Is there a hotel or guest house nearby where I could get a room?” I asked. I hoped that they would offer me a bed in their own home instead.

  “Well, that’s not necessary,” Greta said. “You can stay here. And eat with us.”

  “Those Mennonites in Manitoba, and those that came here to Belize, that’s all one big nest,” Klaas said. “Sometimes you know people without knowing them directly. We know a lot of the same people or we’ve heard about them, and I’m sure I’ve met your pa, so you and I know each other.”

  Greta led me to their summer house. It was weathered and rickety, but in a pleasant camp-like way. It had two single beds covered in colourful quilts, a wooden rocking chair, and a small desk built into the wall under the window. There was a raw, dusty smell to it. The creaky floor was uneven under the linoleum, and holes in the walls and window screens let bugs in. It was perfect.

  The next day I told Klaas that I would be happy to work for my keep. The words were barely out of my mouth before he had me stationed in a musty corner of his barn to clean beans. The ragged tin roof and plank walls let in shafts of light that pierced the dusty air like lances. There was a constant brown blur pouring from the bottom of the noisy screening machine, an endless stream of beans and tiny lumps of dirt nearly the same size and colour, but one was good and one was bad. My job was to pick out the bad as fast as my fingers could move, tossing them on the ground and reaching for more. Again and again I fell behind, scrambling after the conveyor belt. I was a lousy farmer, through and through.

  In the mornings I sat and wrote at my desk in the summer house. I could hear Greta and her teenage daughters, Kenia and Evelin, and the clang of pots and pans through the open kitchen window, just a few metres from where I sat.

  The girls had been orphaned when their El Salvadoran mother died, so Klaas and Greta adopted them, in addition to the eight children they already had. The girls screamed and laughed, Greta tutted and scolded in Plautdietsch.

  Fritz, the family’s German shepherd, sat on the porch of the summer house and stared at me, his pink tongue lolling. Beyond the porch, which was missing a few floorboards, was a backyard of deep grass, a shade tree, and a chicken coop. The sour stench of chicken manure mixed with the sweet loamy smell of cows and took flight on the morning breeze. In the distance, muffled but unmistakable, was the sound of Klaas cajoling his cows into their milking stalls. He was impossible to ignore. His booming laughter and voice filled the house and revealed his location no matter what far corner of the farm he was working in.

  Every morning: “The Lord has given you another day, so that’s something to be thankful for, right?” Klaas’s face beamed as he said it.

  But then I heard him speak to one of the farm workers.

  “Ya mon,” he said, arm
s akimbo, floppy sun hat failing to keep his large nose from turning red. “Dat’s de way we gonna do it mon, you got dat right.” He slipped into the Belizean patois whenever he spoke to non-Mennonites. At first I found it offensive, thinking it was condescending mimicry, but as he told me more of his story, I could see there wasn’t a lofty bone in his body. He just wanted to be understood.

  “My papa, he had an influence on me, and one thing he held very important is that he should never treat an eenheimisch—a native—like the Mennonites treated the Russians in Russia,” Klaas told me. “He was always very conscientious about treating the Belizean people fair.”

  Klaas and Greta had both moved to Belize from the colonies in northern Mexico as children in 1958, part of the first group of Mennonites to settle on Spanish Lookout. Their families were in search of more land after repeated droughts in Mexico. In Belize, they bought wild land that had only a few logging trails cut into thick jungle.

  But the Mennonites were quick to build up wealth, and their pacifist beliefs meant that they didn’t carry guns, making them vulnerable in a country as violent as Belize. Guatemalan guerrillas and bandits were known to cross the border into Belize to carry out raids, posing an additional threat, and it had become more difficult for Mennonites to remain pacifist.

  Ordained Mennonite pacifism can be seen especially in the Münster Rebellion, in the German city of the same name, in 1534. A diverse group of Anabaptists seized power of the city in an attempt to establish a theocracy. They held it for nearly one and a half years, during which time Münster became increasingly militarized, with citizens arming themselves and church steeples repurposed as cannon batteries. The daily lives of residents were strictly controlled, and they were required to wear simple clothing to erase social distinctions. The Catholics wrested it back in 1535 and the captured Anabaptists had their heads chopped off and placed on spikes for display, their genitals nailed to the city gate, and their corpses stuffed into steel cages and hung from the steeple of St. Lambert’s Church.

  The Anabaptists regrouped after the siege to try to restore their unity, but all they could agree on was that they would remain pacifist in the future, that they would not fight back with violence as they had during the siege. Münster became a turning point for the Anabaptist movement, as they never again became a cohesive political force, and their future growth would be fragmented, creating the Amish, Hutterites, and Mennonites. But everyone agreed to shun violence.

  Mennonite pacifism in Russia was tested after World War I, when the Russian government had collapsed and the Red and White Armies, along with anarchists, roved the land. The Mennonites were targeted for being rich and Germanic, and were robbed, jailed, beaten, raped, and murdered in large numbers. It was too much for some Mennonites, who abandoned pacifism, armed themselves, and created militias. It didn’t go well, and the violence against them only worsened, creating a handy lesson for later generations. What happened to the militant Mennonites in Russia showed that peace and non-resistance was the only way.

  Pacifism meant a lot of things to me where I grew up in Canada. It meant I mustn’t join the military, or even the police, because they have to carry guns. By some fluke my childhood toy box contained several two-inch-tall plastic toy soldiers. Perhaps they came from the charity shop, or some weltmensch dropped them along the way, but there’s no way my parents bought me those toy soldiers. They were already in the toy box, and throwing them away would have been wasteful, so, to remain true to his pacifist beliefs, my father cut the tiny barrels off the tiny guns using a hot knife. No more war, now they were just helmeted men wearing backpacks and holding odd-looking clubs.

  A few days after my arrival in Belize I reminded Klaas that he had his own story about pacifism, which I wanted to hear.

  “Let’s go,” Klaas said. He stood up and grabbed his truck keys. “I have time this afternoon, I’ll show you the place.”

  His daughter Kenia begged to join us, and we set off.

  Outside of town, about five miles from the Guatemalan border, with Mexico not far to the north, there were newly broken fields still ringed by piles of tree branches and roots, pushed aside by heavy machinery to make room for crops. This was the edge of Mennonite territory. The fields were interrupted by the occasional bluff of untouched jungle, reminding farmers that the wild was always waiting to return. Klaas slowed to a crawl and inspected a bluff of untouched jungle more carefully. He looked in his mirrors, trying to gauge the distance we’d driven.

  “This is the road we were travelling on when it happened,” Klaas said. His laughter became shorter, his smile more strained as we drove. Now there was a tightness to his voice. “Here’s the corner where we stopped, right here.”

  A wall of sultry air hit us as we climbed from the truck. The still engine ticked with escaping heat. From the towering trees on either side of the road came the undulating screech of insects. The white gravel road glared under the bright sunshine, but in the distance the sky had curdled into dark clouds that were rapidly churning towards us.

  On the morning of May 8, 1991, a Wednesday, a group of Spanish Lookout farmers made a reconnaissance trip to inspect this land, a new purchase. Forty-two people on two trailers, pulled by tractors, out on a fun day trip, chatting and dreaming the dreams of colonialists. Klaus was riding on the front trailer.

  “Before we knew it, there were four people with rifles coming out of the jungle over there, and two from there,” Klaas said, as he pointed into the woods. “And back there were another two people with rifles. And they shot over our heads…pow pow.” He extended his arm like he was holding a starter pistol.

  “Behind me, people were lying on the floor of the trailer. I thought they’d been shot dead, but they’d just thrown themselves down. I stood up from my seat and went and asked the man, ‘Hey, do you have a problem? What can we do for you?’ God already had a grip on me, and I had no fear. It was as if Jesus was carrying me.

  “They told me to lie down on the ground, and I said I would not lie down on the ground for no man. I first wanted to see what they could do. So they said okay, then you come into the jungle with us.

  “They started dragging me into the jungle, and I said, ‘I’m not going into the jungle.’ But they were screaming at me, and I thought they might shoot me dead, so I went with them.”

  The armed men dragged Klaas and five other men into the jungle while the remaining Mennonites fled back to the colony in terror.

  “It’s a long time ago, but I can still feel it here,” Klaas said, patting his chest. He fell silent and stared into the jungle. His floppy grey hat with its red band sagged over his face and dark circles of sweat had appeared on his shirt. The constant toothy smile was still in place under his large nose, but now it looked more like a grimace. “They took all the money we had in our wallets, as well as my friend’s watch,” Klaas said, pulling his wallet out and opening it to demonstrate. “And then they just guarded us. We had some food and water. If I wanted to go to the toilet they’d follow me, with the gun. And then I started to pray.

  “On the first day I stared one of them in the eye so long he started looking away. By lunchtime on the first day he was so scared of my eyes that when I looked at him he’d look the other way.

  “In the evening, when everybody went to sleep, I remained awake. I thought, I’m going to scare these people. I took a stone and I threw it into the underbrush, and it made a rustling sound. The guys jumped up with their guns and looked with their flashlights. Which of us had escaped? Half an hour later, once they were all settled again, I took another big stone and threw it into the trees. They jumped up to go take a look. I did that all night, and towards morning they shone a flashlight into my face, to see if it was me doing it. Just then I did like this,” Klaas said, feigning sleep where he stood in the middle of the road, complete with a throaty snore. “They said, in Spanish to each other, ‘There must be monkeys somewhere.’ They search
ed the trees above, to see if monkeys were throwing stones down. There were no monkeys.”

  The next morning, two of the Mennonites were sent back to the colony with instructions to return with money if they wanted those left behind to live.

  “That afternoon, at four o’clock, the money was supposed to come. That was the longest day of my life. At two o’clock the Holy Spirit said to me, there will be no money coming, you have to prepare yourself for death. And so we prepared to die. At four o’clock the people with the rifles came to us, angry. They said, ‘We told you if you didn’t bring money, we’d shoot you dead.’

  “They tied us to a tree. I thought our lives were over. My partners were crying out loud. All of a sudden, the Holy Spirit told me to speak to these people. And that’s what I did. I said, ‘I love you, you are my friend, and Jesus loves you.’ And they could not shoot. That’s what the love of Jesus Christ can do, it can tie the hands of people, and they could not shoot us. That’s why I’m alive, because I knew the name of Jesus.

  “They wanted B $100,000 [US $50,000], and they said they would give us one more chance. If they didn’t get the money this time, they would shoot us dead. So we went through the test another time.” Klaas paused. He gestured at the jungle with a wide sweep of his arm, the truck keys in his hand jingling as his arm swung in an arc. He swallowed. Kenia stood nearby, saying nothing. She had watched spellbound as he told his story. Now, seeing her father shaken, she stared down at the ground, a toe tracing designs in the dust.

  “Ya,” Klaas said, blinking, as if he’d forgotten the rest of the story. He took a deep breath and remembered.

  “Saturday morning, I spoke to Jesus, and I said, ‘If you are a living Jesus, send some live monkeys through here, to show me you are alive. Before there were no monkeys, but you have made the world, you have made me, you are all powerful, I believe in you.’ Fifteen minutes later a monkey came by, and I could barely believe it. I asked Jesus, ‘Is this true?’ I saw, high in a tree, a big monkey. Then Jesus came to me in a bright light, and he asked, ‘Do you want to work on this earth for me longer?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I do.’ And then he asked again, ‘Do you want to work for me?’ Four times he asked me, and I said, ‘Whenever, whomever, wherever, I will always work for you. My life is your life.’ That’s why I’m still on this earth.