[LINK] "Home in the Chaco"

[rfmcdonald]

This Friday just past, the National Post's Polina Levina has a fascinating article on Canadian Mennonites who, displaced by anti-German sentiment in Canada, went and moved to Paraguay.

The Gran Chaco desert in Paraguay has for centuries been known as L'Inferno Verde, or "the Green Hell." With the temperature routinely reaching 42 C in the summer, no sources of water and gusts of dusty wind through the flat nothingness, it is no surprise that only 3% of Paraguay's population occupies an area that makes up 60% of the country. A Paraguayan diplomat once famously told a British traveller, "Doan go there, ees only esnakes an espiders."

Yet, this inhospitable terrain is home to a vibrant community of 30,000 Mennonites, around 9,000 of them Canadian citizens. Their story is one of endless wanderings, from Germany and Switzerland through Russia to Canada and finally to this desolate patch of terrain, where they were granted a special arrangement by the Paraguayan government to self-rule their land in relative isolation.

[. . .]

At that time, the Paraguayan government was desperate to settle the Chaco, and had already tried buying ships, all-expenses paid, to woo people from England, France and Australia.

"Few came, and those who did soon left," said Peter Dyck, author of Up from the Rubble, an account of Mennonite experiences trying to found new settlements in South America and Canada. "They were ready to give up, but then Canadian Mennonites needed a new home."

More than 70 years later, the Mennonites out-earn indigenous Paraguayans tenfold, supplying 80% of the country's milk and dairy products -- so successful that they now face the challenge of being employers, without being regarded as colonizers.