But Greta didn’t let her lack of vocabulary keep her from speaking her mind on more practical matters, and when Tina was growing up she heard whispers that her mother was too bossy and outspoken. The community’s objection to an outspoken woman told Tina her role was to keep quiet and in the background.
“Today, if people say I’m bossy I say, ‘So what?’” Tina said, laughing. “Over the years my beliefs about Mennonite women have changed. At first, I wasn’t comfortable with leadership because I was taught that was wrong, that women should be behind the scenes and nobody should know that I was involved. When I changed those ideas, things became a lot more enjoyable.”
Tina was married to a Guatemalan refugee, and most of her other siblings had also married Spanish or Creole Central Americans. A cross-cultural marriage didn’t exclude you from the community, but it meant you were different, even among the most moderate of Mennonites. It didn’t have to mean something, but it sure could if you wanted it to. The differences were further complicated by living on a colony.
“People don’t want to let Spanish people into their churches, because then they will intermarry, and if they intermarry, then the good pure Mennonite faith will be lost,” Tina said, laughing out loud at the idea. “As soon as their minds are broadened to understand the world is bigger than just this community, then they will start to notice everyone is human and that there is not such a big difference.”
Tina was in her late teens before she had any interaction with non-Mennonites, and she was still torn over whether her life within the comfortable bubble of Spanish Lookout was dulling her sense of place in the world.
“It doesn’t seem so important what is going on in Belize City, although it should because it is my country. But life is peaceful here. People take care of each other. It seems so otherworldly out there,” she mused.
It was the same growing up in Mennville, where my elementary school was about the same size as Tina’s. My father occasionally listened to the news on the radio, but world events were never discussed around the dinner table. We did not subscribe to many newspapers or magazines, except for those focused on religion and farming. Politics were of no concern to us. Wars, assassinations, cultural icons created or killed—none of it ever found its way to us. We lived in a very comfortable and safe bubble.
Spanish Lookout colony collected its own taxes and built and operated highways, a bank, stores, and a local police force. The colony’s population of 2,000 doubled during the day, when the mostly Hispanic neighbours came to work. It felt, and to a large extent operated, like any other busy farming town. But it was different from other small towns in one important way: only ethnic Mennonites were allowed to become full community members.
Tina’s husband was baptized in their church and he had adopted their Mennonite lifestyle. He even spoke a bit of Plautdietsch. But he was not ethnically Mennonite, instead he was brown, and that meant he could not borrow money at the bank or use the colony’s coupon system. Like many Mennonite colonies, Spanish Lookout used a coupon system for local transactions. Residents and businesses all used the same bank in the Farmers Trading Center. Instead of exchanging cash they wrote each other cheques that were only valid on the colony and could not be redeemed through the national banking system. Every month the accounts were balanced, and the bank transferred money accordingly. But the system was restricted to ethnic Mennonites.
Non-Mennonites, even if they had married into a Mennonite family, were also not allowed to own colony land. Much like the banking system, colonies operate a shadow land-title system. Legally, the colony owns all the land, but it’s divided into individual plots for colony members.
Just as was so often predicted, accepting non-Mennonites into their schools or taking them as marriage partners and business associates created a new set of challenges. There were many people who wanted to join Spanish Lookout. If they were to take applicants there would be lines outside the colony office. But the Mennonites were afraid of losing the advantage they had created for themselves. They had worked hard for all of this, why should they let others reap the benefits without putting in the same work?
Tina’s brother Martin was about thirty years old and slight of build with light brown hair. He had his father’s sense of humour and an impish smile; his conversation was sprinkled with puns and gentle barbs. Martin worked at Universal Hardware, which was Mennonite owned and one of the largest hardware stores in the region.
Martin and his wife, Felicia, were both computer engineers. One day they invited me to their home for lunch. They lived in a small house that was temporarily set up on the edge of the family farm. A well-trodden path through the orchard connected their house and the family home. Setting up a small house on a parent’s property, affordable and near family support, was an age-old tradition among rural Mennonite newlyweds.
“This is it. Welcome!” Martin said, standing in the middle of the one-room house with his arms outstretched.
A kitchen counter ran along one side, opposite to a bed covered in a colourful quilt, while a small dining table took up the middle of the room. A lean-to bathroom had been added to the porch.
“We get snakes in there sometimes,” Martin said, laughing while Felicia shuddered. “Sometimes, when you go to the toilet at night you get a bit of a surprise.”
The house would soon be replaced by a larger one they had bought in an auction. One with a bedroom and a real bathroom.
Martin and Felicia met at the University of Belize in Belmopan. Felicia’s father was Creole and her mother Mestizo, giving her golden-brown skin and curly hair that she wore pulled back from her face. She and Martin spoke to each other in a mix of English and Spanish, and their house felt more like a university apartment than a Mennonite home.
They had the giddy excitement of newlyweds, brimming with plans for the future. They were more concerned with their careers, buying a larger home, and making bus trips across Central America than with having children, for the moment. And Felicia was still coming to grips with her role on the colony.
“People are always surprised when I tell them I am a Belizean, because my skin is light. Some people think I might be American, but for sure not a Mennonite! The darker the skin colour, the harsher the criticism,” Felicia said.
She was part of the church, had married into a Mennonite family, and lived on the colony, but her ethnicity meant she was excluded from many of the rights that ethnically Mennonite community members enjoyed.
“Everyone is very nice to me, but the community has to figure out how to deal with the changes this brings,” Felicia said. “I can’t really be a full part of the community if I can’t sign cheques or coupons at the bank or use the bank to borrow money. The truth is, there may be other things I will be excluded from that we aren’t aware of because we haven’t encountered them yet.”
Some of the barriers were less concrete and more common to any tightly knit ethnic community. Felicia did not speak Plautdietsch, although she was learning.
“The old aunties like it when I say some things in German. It brings their guard down and they seem to be less critical.”
Martin and Felicia craved a more cosmopolitan and stimulating social scene where men and women are free to interact at social gatherings.
“When we’re with our friends I find the separate women and men circles challenging.” She meant that men and women literally sat and socialized in different groups, or even in different rooms. “It makes it difficult to have a social life. I am expected to be in the women’s circle where I have nothing to say and have to work hard to process the German conversation. Martin has to be in the men’s circle, and he gets bored talking about corn prices for more than five minutes. So we just stay at home.”
But they remained on the colony, where pay was higher, and life was safer and more comfortable than elsewhere in Belize. Mennonite businesses were successful and growing, sometimes even offering
the chance for international business travel. Remaining on the colony was a smart career choice in a country where job prospects were otherwise dim, especially for outsiders. Martin was Mennonite enough for both of them to have a better life on the colony than they’d have among the weltmensch.
CHAPTER 8
Belize
My Own Piece of Land
“When I’m walking and I see a puddle, I go like this,” Klaas said, drawing his boot across the floor, as if digging a tiny ditch. “There, now that water can run away.
“The greatest joy in life is to make the ditches and lead water off the land,” he said, his large bony hands tracing the imaginary contours of the land as his voice rose with excitement. “A Mennonite drains land if it’s in Canada, Paraguay, or Belize. Every Mennonite likes to drain land.”
Klaas was right. Mennonites are good at turning marginal land into productive fields, dominating nature to serve our needs. Perhaps it’s our roots in the Low Countries, where holding water at bay was a matter of survival. Maybe it’s thriftiness; Mennonites don’t like spending their money. They like to buy cheap. Swampy land that needs draining can be had for cheap, and all it takes is hard work to make it profitable. Or maybe Mennonites just like the challenge of it, the satisfying result when waterlogged land is made productive.
I had planned this journey from an apartment in the urban chaos of Hong Kong, far from the Low Countries or the pioneering spirit of draining land, but envisoning my overland trip across two continents had given me an appreciation for topography. I hung large maps of the Americas on my wall to help me visualise my route. I circled the places where I knew Mennonites lived. The circles created a vague zigzagging chain that led from high on the wall, so high I had to stand on a stool to reach the locations, all the way south, near the floor, where I’d drop to my hands and knees, pencil clenched between my teeth as I tried to assess the challenges ahead. I’d stand back, admiring the maps, imagining the road that would take me across borders and mountain ranges, skirting coastlines and deserts.
Then I looked closer and traced the chain of circles with my finger. My maps were topographical, with grey marking the mountain highs, browns and light greens shading the foothills and plains, and deep green in the areas with the lowest elevation. The route I’d marked through southern Mexico, Belize, and down into Paraguay and Bolivia showed that the Mennonite settlements I’d marked were more often than not located on, or at least bordering, marginal land. Deep-green territory, where the land dipped and water gathered, areas that cartographers had marked with cross-hatchings. When the Mennonites had arrived, the land was swampy and wet, often covered in wild forest and jungle, but within a few years it was producing crops. Drainage was, as Klaas said, in our blood.
We’d earned a reputation for draining land, starting in the Low Countries and northern Germany, then on the Vistula delta, on the shores of the Baltic Sea, where we dug ditches and built dikes, turning the region into a rich green haven. We’d brought our skills to the Canadian Prairies, where we farmed wheat on the flood plains of the Red River, which regularly breaks free of its banks when it’s overfilled with spring melt. Rosenort, the village that was home to both my parents, is ringed by a high dike to fight the spring tides. Farmhouses are built on man-made hills to keep clear of the annual floods. Each spring the farmers hold their breath, watching the river rise, waiting for it to break its banks. They rejoice when it doesn’t and are resigned when it does. Time is measured in floods.
“Ya, that was the winter after the 1950 flood, so I would have been twenty-one years old…that means your mother was only nineteen then. So no, I don’t think it was Mary who you’re thinking of…” say my elderly relatives when they reminisce, patching together a history measured in plantings, births, and floods.
My father left the Red River Valley at twenty-two to break virgin peat land on the boggy shores of Lake Winnipeg, in Manitoba’s Interlake region. He bought half a section, a 320-acre plot we always called Section 10, its designation according to the Dominion Land Survey in the 1800s. It was old-growth tamarack and spruce and luxuriant moss. It was home to bears and bobcats, wolves and wilderness that would take years conquer. There were no proper roads leading to it, and just beyond it lay mile after thousands of miles of wilderness. We were on the edge of nowhere. The land was cheap because it was beyond the fringe of civilization, part of a new agricultural frontier in the Interlake. The government offered my father favourable financing terms because he was a young man eager to help build Canada’s agricultural industry, to tame the nation’s vast expanse.
Grainy black-and-white photos in our family album show him and my mother, fresh-faced and smiling as they began carving a farm out of the forest in the early 1950s. They were in their early twenties, poor but filled with the thrill of their prospects. It was a grand adventure to them. One picture shows them resting in waist-deep snow while cutting down the pine forest to make room for their first crops, another has my father on a borrowed bulldozer, pushing brush into long windrows for burning. Then there’s the photo of him standing in his first crop of barley, which grew as high as his chest but couldn’t hide his beaming smile.
But even with drainage ditches, the soil was often too wet to work. For Dad, digging drainage ditches became as much a part of farming as planting and harvesting. Ditching often took place in the autumn, after the crops were harvested. Sometimes it was just a simple deepening of ditches already dug with the tractor, other times my father would hire heavy machinery to transform the landscape, thumbing his nose at nature.
But the tractors and harvesters still became stuck. My earliest memories of farming are being mired axle-deep in fragrant peat, tire tracks filled with seepage. My father put rice tires on the harvester—although there was no rice being grown—hoping to better churn his way across his swampy fields. To no avail. Instead, he slapped at the hordes of mosquitoes and once again hooked a logging chain to the harvester and instructed me to pull it taut with the tractor. Sometimes the tractor’s spinning wheels would dig giant holes in the quagmire, pulling the machine deeper and deeper with every revolution.
“No, no! Stop! You’re just spinning, it’s not doing any good!” he’d shout over the throb of diesel engines.
I cursed and complained, an ornery teenager. “Why are we farming here? This is the worst place in the world to farm.”
“It’s good soil, we just need to drain it better. I’ll put another drainage ditch through here and then next year it will be dry,” he said. But it was never dry. Some years we had to wait for frost to firm up the waterlogged fields before the crops could be harvested.
He didn’t think about the historical significance, the places where Mennonites been before, when he bought the land for cheap, dug ditches, and won. He was young and poor and wanted land, so sawing down virgin forest and leading the water away before planting his first crops was the natural thing to do. But it didn’t feel natural to me as a child.
“I’m never gonna be a farmer,” I told him more than once as we stood knee-deep in bog, working to free the machinery.
Then, years after I’d left and my father had long ago accepted that I wasn’t the farmer he’d hoped I’d become, on a trip back to Manitoba to visit my family, I told him I had some money I wanted to invest. His eyes lit up and he leaned forward in his chair.
“Hey, there’s some land for sale near here,” he told me. “It may not go up in value as fast as those stock markets do, but it will always be there. They’re not making more land.”
The language of land—drainage, fences, good soil, stony or not—was one I’d never learned to speak. But the idea of owning land, my very own land, still appealed to the Mennonite in me. I’d thought the Mennonite in me had faded, replaced by urbane tastes and an international lifestyle, so I was surprised at how his suggestion struck a chord in me. Drifting through the world’s capitals earning a living with my pen was good fun,
but owning land, now that was permanence. That was long-term planning, building something for the future. Owning land means you don’t owe nothing to nobody. It means you’re your own man.
There was an eighty-acre field a few miles from our own farm, but on higher ground, and for sale. It was cleared of trees, already tamed, and well drained. No digging of ditches needed. It wasn’t boggy, I made sure of that.
So I bought the land with a loan from the hometown credit union, a small place where my family had banked for so long the manager still recognized my voice on the telephone. It was with great satisfaction that I took the For Sale sign off the gate and walked into the field for the first time.
I kicked a clod of soil and thought, That’s mine. I eyed the slope towards the lake, pretending, for a moment, that I knew something about land. I had friends and family who owned thousands of acres, so there was a tinge of city-boy sheepishness to my pride in owning this modest plot. I knew I was reaching back to something that wasn’t me anymore, that I had skipped some important steps. I hadn’t broken my own land, planted it with crops, let the land tether me to a place, a community, church and family that consumed me all day every day for my entire life. It wasn’t the same as what Section 10 had done for my family. This land had not been watered by sweat from my father’s brow. It did not come with stories of hardship, work and progress. And I’d never be a real farmer like my father. But I did have a piece of my own land. Solid, well-drained land.
The topic of land—not enough, too expensive, where more could be found, which soil was good and which was bad—was discussed every day, with nearly every man I met on Mennonite colonies. On Spanish Lookout it wasn’t just idle speculation. The colony was closing a deal to buy 29,000 acres of unbroken land, adjacent to the 55,000 acres they already owned. The leaders of the colony had called a meeting to discuss how the land would be divided among the eager farmers. The colony would hold the title to the land, and then lease it out to the farmers.
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