I sat on a stone ledge overlooking the terraces, surrounded by dry stone walls that had remained straight and true through the years. As the sun filled the old courtyards and roofless houses I was struck by the sacrifice and work required to build this city high in the mountains. Was this the same thing Mennonites were talking about when they said they wanted to “build something” for themselves and their children? Most meant a farm or business, but they also meant a way of life, a continuation of the belief system their ancestors had carried from Russia to Canada to wherever they now lived. Working hard, leaving a legacy of values and a mark on the earth that showed they’d been there and played their part. Being Mennonite seemed deeply rooted in the struggle to secure the culture, cementing what was already past. If they wanted to preserve, unchanged, something as fleeting as a culture, they needed wealth to hold it in place. So building up wealth, farms, and land became synonymous with maintaining Mennonite culture.
Remaining separate from the society around them was a central tenet of every Mennonite community I’d been to. Yet Mennonites have also adopted local traits, from dressing for the environment, such as wearing sandals instead of boots, to adding chilies to their bland food and learning how to manipulate corrupt governments to get what they want. Our culture was constantly evolving whether we liked it or not, or even realized it. But Mennonites prefer looking back, clinging to old ideas, rather than looking ahead to see where that strong foundation of solid ideals and morals can take us.
In southern Mexico I’d passed through Mennonite communities where they were recolonizing land abandoned by the Maya a millennium ago. The Maya had created great wealth only to lose it all. Where had I heard that line before? It made me think of the Mennonites leaving their beautiful farms in Russia. The Maya had disappeared from the Yucatán Peninsula, as well as neighbouring areas, because of warring, drought, and overpopulation. Now it was the Mennonites’ turn to own the land and use it to build their society. The Maya had expanded their knowledge of science and mathematics, trying to understand the world around them. The Mennonites chose ignorance and blindness, hoping it would help their culture survive. When I asked Mennonites about the remnants of Mayan civilization abandoned across their land, they shrugged their shoulders, unimpressed.
“There’s just a pile of old stones left,” they said.
Three weeks after arriving on the South American continent I descended from the arid mountains into lush green forest and the steamy tropics of southwestern Bolivia. Santa Cruz de la Sierra, with its traffic and throngs of people, was a shock after weeks of backcountry riding and camping. I had not spent time in a Mennonite community since Belize, two months and some 10,000 kilometres ago. Covering that distance, alone with my thoughts, had given me time to contemplate what I’d learned about my culture so far. I’d come to terms with the bits I saw in myself, both the pleasant bits and the jarring realizations. I was ready to see familiar Mennonite faces again—familiar not because we’d met before, but because we’d come from the same place.
Just inside the city limits I came to a major intersection, where I stopped to study my map. Left or right? I looked up to see a man standing on the curb near me. He was wearing dark schlaub’betjse, a plaid long-sleeved shirt, and a gleaming white cowboy hat.
“Hallo!” I shouted. “Which way to the center of the city?” I asked, in Plautdietsch.
He looked at me, surprised to hear a man on a dusty overloaded motorcycle speak to him in that tongue. Then he raised his arm, pointing the way. I had found my Mennonites again, this time in the heart of Bolivia, where I knew they harboured dark secrets.
CHAPTER 12
Bolivia
Secrets and Silence
There are more than 70,000 Mennonites in a cluster of colonies a few hours east of Santa Cruz, and they are among the most socially conservative in the Mennonite diaspora. Most of them are Old Colony Mennonites, who live nineteenth-century lifestyles and practise the strictest form of separation from broader society. They believe that their entire culture, from language to clothing, from education, village, and home design to their form of self-government, are all a part of the church and directly linked to their spiritual state. Being obsequious to the church is paramount, with disobedience seen as a rejection of faith itself.
A corrosive mix of isolation, poor education, and inept leadership had put Bolivian Mennonites in the spotlight and, as soon as I arrived in the region, I sought out David Janzen, a Canadian missionary to the Mennonites, to gain insight into what had turned into an international scandal. David had a fleshy face, an unkempt head of thinning grey hair, and the affable nature of someone who dealt with crises on a daily basis without getting much credit for it.
“It has been a struggle,” he said as we drove along a grid of gravel roads with small, identical houses on both sides. He called out greetings to families sitting on their porches, sometimes raising an arm to wave to someone without pausing his words.
The streets of Villa Nuevo, a village in the heart of colonies, had a raw newness to them, just like its inhabitants. The planted trees were small and spindly, and the houses were clothed in a mix of tarpaper and siding. They were simple homes on small parcels of land. This was the most urban setting most of its residents had ever lived in and their gardens took up large portions of each lot.
All of the residents of Villa Nuevo had left, or been ejected from, strictly conservative Mennonite churches and colonies. Some of them were banned for disobeying their colony leaders. To be banned, or excommunicated, by the church means being rejected by the entire community, as nearly all activities are somehow related to the church. Family members are not allowed to speak or socialize with those who are banned, or they face the same censure. A banned person is lost, pushed out of the collective mind, cut from all relations. A person who dies while banned will go to hell. And everyone on the colony believes in hell, so Villa Nuevo represents a sort of renewed salvation for its residents.
To leave one’s colony means to never return, like Walter turning his back on his brother Klass, in Belize. Sometimes people transfer to another colony, but transfers are rare, especially when families have been at the center of a scandal or had a reputation for challenging authority. Most families remain on a colony, even if it means being punished or ridiculed, rather than try to survive on their own “in the world.”
“They don’t understand the idea of a community outside of a colony, where people live together, pay taxes, and have a school, but also have some independence, like maybe going to different churches, or wearing different clothes. We tell them, don’t worry about the neighbour, focus on your own new beginning.”
Villa Nuevo had grown to nearly fifty families within five years, with a shelter for battered women and children, and a twenty-eight-bed alcohol and drug rehabilitation centre named Guia de Paz, or Path to Peace. The centre was still two months from opening and already it was overwhelmed with requests, primarily from Old Colony Mennonites. The organizers planned to add residential addictions counselling for women as well. The colony had built it because Bolivia’s state facilities and services were scarce and poorly run, and anyway, Mennonite drug addicts didn’t want to be associated with Bolivian drug addicts. Mennonites were different, but things were a long way from their ideal of a pure, simple life. A big part of the problem was poor education. Catechism takes up much of the time in Old Colony schools, and children are lucky to be able to stumble through a short Bible reading and do basic arithmetic by the age of twelve or fourteen when they leave school. Science and humanities are ignored entirely. The schools also do a poor job of teaching German, the language they’ve gone to such lengths to protect. While Sunday church services are conducted in High German—Plautdietsch is the vernacular form—few people are proficient in the language.
The Mennonites had moved from country to country to defend their right to a low level of education in the fear that better education w
ould only encourage challenges to authority, pique interest in the outside world, and unravel a community that had remained tightly knitted together for centuries.
“The more you read the Bible, the more you know, and once you know more, God expects more from you. So it’s better to not learn,” David said. “That’s the way they think.”
David slowed his truck as we drove past the Bridge, Villa Nuevo’s school with space for 130 students. It offered a nationally approved curriculum all the way through grade twelve, including Spanish and the sciences.
“This school here, this is our hope,” David said. “This is what we hope will make the difference over the long term. It won’t happen overnight though.”
When Mennonites first came to Bolivia, they agreed to teach their children basic Spanish while the government agreed to leave colony schools under community control, operating largely in German. However, over the years the colonies ignored the clause to include basic Spanish instruction. In fact, community leaders so effectively ignored Spanish that most people came to believe that their original agreement with the government exempted them from teaching their children Spanish.
Now the government was putting pressure on the colonies to raise their educational standards and teach their children Spanish. Colony leaders grumbled that this was all the fault of Bolivia’s increased “socialism,” which in their minds was the same as communism. And everyone knew that communism, whatever that was, was bad, because it came from Russia.
The Bolivian government had some leverage with the Mennonites because many of them were still Canadian and Mexican citizens through their parents, and they remained in Bolivia on expired temporary visas, although by now about three-quarters of the Mennonites had been born in Bolivia. The government threatened to throw them out of the country if they didn’t comply with educational reforms, and the situation escalated to the point where the Mexican and Canadian consulates intervened to broker a deal.
Canada was present in their lives other ways as well. Manitoba Colony, one of the best-known Bolivian colonies, was named after a colony in Mexico, which was named after my home province. And David and his wife, Lisa, were two of many moderate Canadian Mennonites who came to Bolivia in an attempt to open the closed colonies and offer help to those who wanted to escape. They were supported by Mennonite churches in Canada, missionaries to their own people.
David managed a Christian radio station, Radio Trans Mundial, which broadcast sermons, religious music, and news in a mix of German, Plautdietsch, and Spanish.
“Radios are officially banned on the colonies, but a lot of people have them hidden in the barn or in a backroom and they listen to them secretly, up plietch.”
Up plietch. Secretly, hidden, behind closed doors. I’d hear that term a lot in Bolivia.
Old Colony churches do not preach salvation through a religious conversion such as being “born again” but rather through obedience to the old ways, by living a quiet, family-centred life. More-moderate Mennonites in Canada and the US therefore see it as their duty to convert Old Colony Mennonites to a more expressive and evangelical form of Christianity. The Old Colony leaders were having none of it. “Betjeare [conversion, ‘born again’ in their Christian faith] is almost a curse word on some of these colonies,” one missionary told me.
Old Colony leaders said their communities had no greater social problems than any other society. They didn’t need saving. There was no darkness in need of light. They just wanted to be left alone to live a peaceful and productive life.
But there was plenty of evidence to the contrary. I’d read newspaper reports about Manitoba Colony and its new-found infamy months before I set off on my journey. The reports said that starting sometime in 2005 a group of Mennonite men had used a spray-based animal tranquilizer to incapacitate families in their homes at night, and then raped the women and children. They were accused of carrying out rapes in many homes, on various colonies, until they were caught in 2009, tried, and given prison sentences of between twelve and twenty-five years. The case had been labeled the “Ghost Rapes” of Bolivia due to the use of the amnesic spray.
I rejected the story as wild hearsay when I first read it. It was too outlandish, too dramatic, to have taken place on a Mennonite colony. Then, as I learned the details, and as David and Lisa described the situation on the colonies, my disbelief turned to horror. I felt a tightening at the back of my throat, a strong desire to scream, a disgust and loathing, as I listened. And once I’d heard, I struggled to look at any Old Colony man the same way.
In addition to being a case of gross male chauvinism, it had become a Mennonite version of the Salem witch trials, where a theocracy built on isolationism and religious extremism had led to false accusations and tragic lapses in due process. There were also reasons to doubt the stories.
“Most observers doubt a lot of the factors in this case,” David said. “There are a lot of political forces at play that make it hard to believe some of the claims.”
The most glaring of the doubtful factors was that colony vigilantes, often the heads of the very households the men were accused of targeting, had tortured the accused to produce confessions. The claims that they had used a “magic spray” were dubious, and women still complained about incest and sexual assault, even with the accused in prison. These factors made David doubt the official narrative, and he, and others, suspected the arrests were a guise to cover up a long-running problem with incest on the colonies.
The story was a devastating one, no matter which version you heard, regardless of which details were included, created, or forgotten. It had torn through the community, which had quickly closed ranks; a wound healed at the surface but still festering deep inside. But most important, to me, it revealed the bigger truths, and the grander lies, that all the stories about Mennonites as great colonizers didn’t include.
Would I want to abandon my search for identity after digging into this festering sore? Would it make me abandon the identity that I was feeling increasingly confident in with every mile and community I saw? We Mennonites or those Mennonites? I wasn’t sure yet.
Every Saturday, Old Colony families flooded into Santa Cruz on buses and in the backs of grain trucks driven by weltmensch, or in the colony’s own wagons, pulled by tractors. The wagons were one form of motorized transport approved by the colony leaders, as their people weren’t going to go anywhere far, or fast, on a flatbed trailer towed by a chugging Massey Ferguson. Once in central Santa Cruz, the Old Colony men stood around in packs, hands on hips or slouched against shopfronts, in their dark schlaub’betjse and white cowboy hats, and watched the world go by. Some of them bartered with Bolivian shopkeepers over the tools of nineteenth-century farming, such as harnesses, milk pails, and wagons. The women bustled from shop to shop, buying pots and pans, bolts of fabric, brooms, and soap. Children—boys dressed as miniature versions of their fathers while girls wore straw hats with bright ribbons—gawked wide-eyed at the weltmensch all around them. They took long, sensuous licks of their ice cream cones and soaked up the big-city life.
Lisa ran a small women’s counselling office down a back alley near the city’s central market, and Saturday was her busiest day.
“I have a phone that they can use, and sometimes they use my office for other things, so they have an excuse to come see me,” she said. “It takes time for them to feel safe enough to talk to me.”
Her discreet space was filled with heavy Mennonite women wearing serious faces, their round bodies swathed in dark, suffocating dresses. The reek of sweat permeated the warm air.
Lisa was a spring flower among them. She was petite and sported a broad smile and girlish charm. She was eager to hear new stories, meet people, and try new things. I took an instant liking to her. The Old Colony women must have overlooked her sparkle—overtly sparkly for a Mennonite woman—for they did confide in her. They told her stories of dark deeds done up plietch, terrible se
crets borne by women who saw no escape.
“It’s very hard to just listen sometimes. I feel terrible, so helpless sometimes,” Lisa said. “The things they tell me, they’re not just sins, but the men that do these things should get locked up in jail. But it doesn’t help us or them if we go to the police each time. The women won’t come to me anymore, because they don’t want it public, they don’t want me to take things that far. We have to try to make changes from the inside. And if we interfere too much the leaders will just pack up and move somewhere else. That’s a real risk.”
But the women hinted at the truth. Mothers who were afraid to leave young daughters at home alone with their fathers and brothers. Girls who refused to use the outhouse at night, because their father or brother might attack them in the darkness. The young girls were confused, as all they knew about sex was gleaned from watching the horses behind the barn. Now they were becoming infected with sexually transmitted diseases even though they considered themselves virgins—they had, after all, never given themselves to a man.
“Some of the men visit the Bolivian prostitutes,” Lisa said. “And, of course, most of them know nothing about condoms, so then they come home and use their daughters, and the diseases are spread without anyone understanding what is happening.”
Silence was the key. Secrets kept from leaders, from other women, from outsiders, from all. Mothers and their daughters would wake up with bleeding vaginas, with their nightgowns torn and soiled. One woman said she awoke with ropes on her wrists. They couldn’t remember what had happened, but they felt funny in the morning, with headaches and foggy minds. Mothers and daughters were both waking up to the same horror, but they kept it a secret from each other out of shame.
“On the colony everything is done up plietch,” David said. “Everyone uses cell phones up plietch. They listen to the radio up plietch. If you get an offer to do some work with your tractor off the colony, for a weltmensch, you put the rubber tires on and go do the work up plietch, and then when the work is done you put the steel wheels back on. As long as people don’t find out, it’s considered okay.”
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