“We tried to live our own way right where we were. But it didn’t work well, we were too few, and in the midst of others. So we asked some of the Old Colony if they would join us, and we moved here. They gave up smoking and drinking, and we combined some things, like how we conduct the church services.”
The colony, which had begun with twelve families, had gone through difficult early years, and some of its members moved to the US in the 1980s. Now, thanks to their large families, there were about fifty households for a total population of more than three hundred people, and they had spawned numerous daughter colonies in Belize as well as in Bolivia.
“It’s still hard sometimes, but I hope that it remains alive. I have twelve children, ten boys and two girls, and seventy grandchildren. I’ve expressed my wish that they all continue to live like this, and they do,” Walter said, leaning back in his seat, arms outstretched on the backrest.
I reminded him that I was staying with his brother Klaas. “Do you see him often?” I asked, knowing the answer.
“We would never go see our brothers and sisters in other communities,” Walter said. “I don’t like being around those people who believe and live differently. That could affect us and we might lose our faith. And I don’t want to support their way, their pursuit of money. It’s better if we just stay here.”
Walter and Klaas might not have been on speaking terms, but they still shared a similar chummy confidence and outspokenness. They were both characters, not afraid of being different. Oot bunt. But taking offence with his brother’s sinful concessions to modernity gave Walter, the shorter of the two, a sort of pious high ground.
Walter paused, noticing the red blinking light of the camera mounted on the top of my helmet. I’d set the camera on the bench beside me, aimed at Walter.
“What is that?” he asked, pointing at the camera. The jocular tone was gone. “We don’t allow any cameras, and we don’t take any pictures.” “And if others have cameras?”
“We prefer that they don’t take pictures of us,” he said.
Martin had warned me that I would not be allowed to take photos on the colony, and I felt a bit ashamed for having tried. I turned it off with an apology.
“So what other rules do you have here?” I asked. “Why are all the clothes the same colour?”
“Well, they’re not rules, we all choose to live this way,” Walter said. “The colour of the clothes is not so important. We would buy cloth in other colours if these ones were not available. But the clothes should not be too tight, they should not reveal the human form. And we think it’s better to have long sleeves.”
Sewing their own clothes was another mark of virtue. Besides, anything adhering to their sartorial tastes was hard to find in shops.
“We still have to buy our shoes and our hats. It would be better if we didn’t have to,” Walter said.
“God meant for men to have beards, so why cut them? And the Bible says the man’s hair on his head should be short. So we live just like that, so that you can see the difference between the men and the women. Though I also know of two sisters, Reimer girls, many years ago, who had full beards of thick hair. They had to shave.” Walter chortled at the memory. It was a joke I could imagine Klaas sharing as well.
Children entered school at approximately seven years of age and completed their education by the age of twelve or thirteen. The government did not interfere with their curriculum, which consisted of memorizing the Bible, singing hymns, and learning basic arithmetic, reading, and writing.
“We don’t learn why or how it rains. I don’t know that stuff. We just burn off the forest, dig a hole, and plant our corn, and then we hope and pray that it rains. And if it rains, good, then the corn will grow better. If not, God will take care of us,” Walter said. He was boasting, not apologizing.
Their farms used only animal and human power, producing cash crops such as potatoes and watermelons while also growing much of their own feed corn, pork, beef, and other food. Church leaders were currently debating whether harnessing a nearby stream for hydro-mechanical power was a sin or not. Some saw it as a natural way to power their flour mill, others disagreed.
“I don’t like the idea because it’s no different from using electricity, and we don’t allow that,” Walter said. “It means we’re no longer earning everything with our hands. Maybe it will cause a split in the community.”
Another split. Some brothers would be right and some wrong. Some on their likely way to hell, others maintaining the path of righteousness. The break would invariably separate brothers and sisters.
Interpretations of what was and wasn’t a sin could be absurd. Even though they themselves were not allowed to own cars, they accepted rides in the vehicles owned by weltmensch when medical treatment or business necessitated long-distance travel.
“The weltmensch don’t know any better,” Walter explained.
However, they refused to accept a ride from more moderate Mennonites living on nearby Spanish Lookout, as that would be a sin. A Mennonite should know better than to drive a car, so accepting a ride from him was condoning his sin.
Martin had described the rule to me, chuckling the whole time.
“Mennonite guys from Spanish Lookout will stop and pick up people on the road who come from Barton Creek because they don’t recognize the vehicles. So the driver speaks Spanish the whole time, and the guy he picked up thinks he’s a weltmensch, and then as soon as they’re doing a hundred kilometres an hour the driver starts speaking Plautdietsch, and the Barton Creeker thinks he’s caused a sin,” Martin said, giggling at the prank. “They beg them to stop the car so they can get out.”
Someone on the colony was responsible for buying medical supplies and vitamins and distributing them, but not for profit, as earning commission was a sin. Walter’s contribution to the community, besides his many offspring, was building wooden tables and chairs for anyone that needed them. The furniture on the veranda was painted a dull brown, but the house had no paint.
“Painting a house is just vanity,” Walter said. “Paint costs money, and we don’t think it makes that big of a difference in preserving the wood. Therefore, it’s just about making the house look pretty, so we instead save that money, so we need to earn less.
“The downfall of many people will be their love for money, the constant need to make more money. But those people can eat no more lettuce or beans than I can,” he said. “I could sell things for more money than I buy them for and tell people, ‘Here, buy it, it’s a great deal.’ But I’d rather live off the land, although sometimes I’m concerned that we charge too much for our produce, which is also not right.”
There was an old Mennonite saying, attributed to one of the earliest preachers, that emphasized the race for humility: When our hearts were golden our houses were wooden, when our houses became golden our hearts became wooden. While simple living and humility were preached in all Mennonite communities, most Mennonites also worked hard to grow their farms and businesses. Economic expansion and growth were seen as the positive fruits of their labour and honest living, as long as it didn’t become all-consuming. There was no better way to gain the respect of the community than to have money and not show it. Buying a new car meant that someone had money, buying a fancy new car showed they were too proud. Where that line between success and humility lay was open for constant judgment.
“I’ve travelled through Mexico and into the US and Canada and I’ve visited many Mennonite communities and churches there,” Walter said. “I think that most of them are living too high of a life. They have big farms, they bring these big trucks on the yard and load them with so many cattle to sell for money.
“Anything that is not necessary we try not to use. We need clothes, some food, a dry place to sleep. That’s all we need in life.”
However, it appeared that Mennonites couldn’t help but generate wealth. Thanks to hard wo
rk and prudent farming Lower Barton Creek had literally generated a pile of cash, a fact that Mennonites on Spanish Lookout again shared with a snide snicker. The community had, for a long time, hidden their money in a hole in the ground rather than deposit it in a bank, as using a bank would represent reliance on modern society. But someone had shared the location of the colony’s secret cache, and in the dead of night robbers had made off with the colony’s savings. Now the colony had a single bank account. Within the colony, and with trusted nearby merchants, they still transacted with coupons in order to maintain better control of funds and ensure that people did not spend sinfully.
I thought about life in Hong Kong, where acquiring more, bigger, and better was the driving force for most lives. The more contemporary Mennonite colonies were little different from the rest of North America in their embrace of consumerism. Here, the attempt at living free and easy, surrounded by a close community of family and friends, was something any urban hipster would dream of. These Mennonites had removed themselves from many of the petty concerns of the rest of the world, focusing instead on what they believed to be most important, which was God and family. It wasn’t that they thought technology or other modern conveniences were inherently evil. Rather, they simply saw that these things distracted them from their real goals.
The pastoral stillness of the farm was appealing. The beards and homegrown food, the suspenders and self-righteousness—hipsters would love all of that. But no books! No carving a guitar and starting a bluegrass band, no brewing craft beer, no riding of fixed-wheel bicycles or…none of that. Just work, family, and church. That’s where the hipster dream ended for me. Perhaps there was too much work for boredom to be a threat. Or maybe that was why they all stared so much; they were bored but work kept them from doing anything about it. Maybe the boredom accounted for the big families.
Walter’s holier-than-thou attitude, his sapient airs, also undermined it for me. They’d taken the self-righteousness of Mennonite separatism to a new level, and they wore it like a badge. It was an arrogance that was only possible when combined with a large dose of ignorance.
“I wouldn’t say we’ve got it all right just yet. We still have to work against sin in our midst,” Walter said. “I think we’re very happy people here, some of the happiest in the world. Happiness makes you strong but crying makes you weak.”
Walter’s wife appeared in the doorway and beckoned us inside for lunch. The house was well-built and clean but gloomy without lights. Kerosene lamps stood ready for the night. There were a few small side cupboards, a daybed in the main room, and a small bedroom with a double bed and a colourful quilt visible through an open door. The quilts were the only colours I’d seen since entering the community, other than the bright blue of people’s eyes. The floors were raw wood, and the walls were unadorned.
“You don’t like people taking your picture, but does that mean you’re not supposed to show any pictures in your house as well?” I asked.
“Yes. We burned all of our photos when we came here. Photos just make you proud. What do you do before taking a photo? You comb your hair and put on nice clothes. So now we don’t need to worry about that anymore.”
Walter was in the midst of a building project, adding a guest room to the house, as well as a skylight above the wood-burning kitchen stove at the request of his wife.
“She needs some light, so she doesn’t over-pepper the eggs,” he joked.
Walter directed me to a small washroom containing a bucket of water and homemade soap. They used river water for washing and rainwater for drinking.
We sat at a wooden table set by the window overlooking the pasture. Walter bowed his head to pray silently. The lunch was silent as well, our heads bent over tin plates with boiled potatoes and red beans, pickled cauliflower, bread and butter. Walter shooed the occasional fly off the food, but there was little else to be heard. No engines, no music, just the insects in the deep grass that grew around the house.
His wife, still quiet, served plumma moos, a creamy cold fruit pudding, and coffee for dessert.
“We don’t always have food like this at lunch, with sweets, but we have a guest, so it’s special,” Walter said, winking at me.
When his coffee cup was empty Walter cleared his throat, looked at me to make sure I was following his example, and then bowed his head in pious prayer again. The others raised their heads and stood up from the table in one motion.
“Na yo. I guess I’ll ride back to Klaas’s place,” I said. “I’ll tell him you said hello.”
Walter smiled as if that was a kind but unnecessary offer.
I could hear Klaas’s voice and booming laughter spilling through the screened windows as soon as I turned off the motorcycle engine in front of his house. I sat on my bike, listening to the babble of voices from inside. Their uninhibited laughter was such a relief after the severity of Lower Barton Creek.
I’d become comfortable with the family, and I no longer waited for invitations to sit down. So I went inside and pulled a chair up to the table. I enjoyed their simple home with its panelled walls covered in multi-generational, multi-ethnic family photos and the dining table that hosted simple but filling meals.
“Your brother Walter mentioned something interesting when I visited him,” I said to Klaas, hesitating for just a bit, wondering if I should ask about this. “Something about how you and Greta grew up together.”
They both burst out laughing, Greta’s face reddening, while Klaas slapped his knee in glee.
“What?! What’s so funny?” Kenia asked, entering the kitchen.
“Well, Greta, why don’t you explain it,” Klaas said, a teasing tone to his voice. He had a twinkle in his eye, and his clumsy but good-natured ribbing and his love of laughter had made me expect a story every time he opened his mouth. Again, just like my own grandpa, his stories more often than not included a starring role for himself, which was more palatable given his humble demeanour.
“Well, ya. For five and a half years Klaas and I were relatives,” she said. “My mom and his dad got married, that made us relatives.”
“Oh, that story,” Kenia said as she turned back to the kitchen.
“It was no big deal,” Klaas said, waving his hand dismissively.
“When we moved from Canada to Mexico, we were both babies and our families were on the same train,” Greta explained. “And in Mexico we were always in the same village and the same school, and he was my brother’s best friend. Then we moved to Belize in the same big group, and we went to school together in the same village.”
When Greta and Klaas were seventeen and eighteen respectively, they both lost a parent. Greta’s mother and Klaas’s father passed away, both leaving behind large families. Every family needed a woman to run the home, clothe and feed the family, and a man to work the farm, which provided for the whole household. It didn’t take long for their widowed parents to marry each other, bringing the families together under one roof. Klaas and Walter and all their siblings moved into Greta’s house, the building that had become Tina’s school.
“I used my wits,” Klaas said, grinning. We were still sitting at the dining room table. Greta, Kenia, and Evelin were in the kitchen, stopping their work to come listen or add their voice at critical points of the story.
“I liked her very much, but I knew that if she got to know me as her brother, we’d lose what is needed to get married, so I kept my distance. I was very shy. I always sat at the other end of the table and I was very careful to keep my manners so that she shouldn’t lose interest in me.
“In my heart there was an immediate spark, but I hid it. I kept it closed,” Klaas said as he put one of his large hands against his chest. “It took two or three years. I gave her an orange or two now and then, little gifts to keep her positive. I was very well-behaved.”
Their parents were first cousins, making Klaas and Greta second cousins, but,
as they both emphasized, they were not brother and sister by blood, and their family situation was out of their control. “I read the Bible and it said Sarah and Abraham were relatives and they got married and so I thought I could too,” Klaas said.
They chuckled, exchanging glances, ignoring the clamour coming from Kenia and Evelin, who were demanding details even though they’d heard the story many times before. Greta was still playing the innocent one, maintaining she was blind to it all.
“I thought we were just friends,” she said, bending her head low over the stove.
They both fell silent when I asked what their parents had thought of it. Klaas cleared his throat.
“They were happy. Especially her dad was very happy. They had concerns, but…” He shook his head and then broke into laughter. “I was kind of a gentleman back then.”
“It was hard,” Greta says. “But we didn’t know that adults could move out on their own. It wasn’t done. If you weren’t married, you belonged in the home.”
Klaas nodded, staring at the floor. “If I saw that happening now, I’d say ‘Boy, build yourself a small house at that end of the village and you live there, and your girlfriend lives here, and you come visit when you want to, and when you don’t want to you walk on by.’”
Theirs was anything but a normal dating life, even by the modest and chaste Mennonite standards of the day. They lived under one roof as brother and sister for five years before getting married.
“I never had that excitement of the boy coming over to visit me, or asking me out on a date,” Greta said.
“Klaas would get up early to do the milking, and I got up early to work in the kitchen as the housemaid, because we had a big family. Everyone else was still asleep at that hour, so we could talk a bit. We’d meet on the porch every morning and that was our date. Very little beside that. There were a few evenings, dates, where we’d really talk. Everyone was teasing us. The little brothers were curious, they’d watch everything we’d do.”
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