Road into the Chaco, Paraguay, with the "very long-legged red and white birds, their beaks almost as long as their bodies" described by Maria Toews. 

Raising her large family in the Chaco, during the 1920s and 30s, Maria Toews did not see herself as a significant person in her time. Two World Wars came and went, thousands of refugees from Russia poured into the Chaco. The whole world woke up and changed as new ways of travel and communication opened up its last frontiers. But Maria never wrote about that. She mentioned none of the social and political events of her time, not even the church decisions (leading thousands of Canadian Mennonites to Mexico and Paraguay) that so drastically affected her life. All that, as she saw it, "came from God," and her duty consisted in nothing other than to make the best of it, through common sense and prayer, with implicit trust in him. 
 
What stood out to Maria were God's pleasant surprises along the way. The blessing of health after sickness, how good the food tasted when they had it, and how nice their house looked, with so many flowers and trees around it, after the hard work of building it with primitive materials in a strange land.  

Meine Erinnerungen . . . 

Im Januar, als mein Mann noch auf der Reise nach dem Vieh war . . .  In January, while my husband was gone to fetch the cattle from Puerto Casado our oldest daughter, Marieche, now seventeen years old came down with the typhus. She lay in bed three weeks before he came home. That was a sad time for us. Many times Marieche was so low we thought she was dying, and my husband was so far away. She lay in bed yet for two weeks after his return and all her hair fell out. After that she got curly hair. But our Father in heaven heard our earnest prayers (auch dann hat der liebe himmlische Vater unsere ernstlichen Gebet erhört) and granted our daughter her health again. Oh, that was such a blessing, to have my husband and son come back, healthy and unharmed (glücklich und gesund), from such a long trip. I thank God again and again for his great love, his mercy and his goodness to us during this time.

At this time our Mennonite people began to work on the property boundaries. A surveyor came from Asuncion but it took until the next winter until the villages were laid out and we could move onto our land. On the eastern side of the colony the people from Saskatchewan settled in a village they called Bergthal. The village of Waldheim, where we were to settle, lay 27 km south of Loma Plata. My husband and the boys went down there for two weeks to build a corral and clear a space on the edge of the jungle where we could set up our tents.

After living eleven months at the Loma Plata camp we moved down to Waldheim on the 19th of August, 1928. David K. Fehrs were our travelling companions. It was a slow journey, and we camped along the way for the night. The next day, just before noon we got to our new village. They had already dug a well, but the water was a bit salty. That first day we set up our tents and unpacked our stuff. We had two tents to sleep in, one for storage, and one larger one in which we lived and ate. The second day we made a chicken coop, digging in poles we cut from the bush, and surrounding them with wire mesh. We put corrugated iron over it for a roof. That wasn’t much work.

We had 30 hens by now and two ducks. We always had to close the coop for the night or the wild animals would get more of the chickens than we would. During the day the chickens were in the bush and the fox sometimes got one.

At the same time we began to clear the jungle. We let the big trees stand for shade and the children made trails beneath and around them. The jungle, underneath, was a solid mass of prickly brush and vines so that one could not walk through it without getting caught on the cactus or on the sharp branches.

Our sons Bernhard and Herman (nineteen and fifteen years old) fetched the rest of our things from Loma Plata. On that trip one of the oxen got sick and died. With all the long trips we had made the other ox was tired and worn out too so we had to buy us new ones. 

Mennonites with a load of cotton between Loma Plata and the rail-head, in the early years. Oxen, horses, and men pulled together to get the loads through the soft places.

We sent Bernhard out to Puerto Casado to look for a yoke of oxen. He left with David Fehr’s David and Isaak Fehr’s Isaak from the new village of Laubenheim on the 25th of September. Several days before they left Bernhard had been suffering bad headaches and a pain in his back. On the way out to Puerto Casado he got sick and started running a high fever. They still had one week to go by ox-cart and then one day on the railroad.

When they got out to the port Bernhard bought us the oxen yet, but he was so sick he went to see a doctor. The doctor told him at once that he had the typhus and needed to stay in bed. He also forbade our son to start back into the Chaco with the oxen.

Because there was no hospital in Puerto Casado our son found himself a bed in the nearly empty immigration barracks. Only a few of our people were left, those that had stayed behind because of sickness. The Peter Wiebe family took him in although they had been planning to leave.

On the tenth of October it rained heavily at our place, with lightning and thunder, during the forenoon. At two o’clock, after the noon meal, a rider came to us on horseback. It was a Paraguayan boy from Puerto Casado bringing us a note that our son lay sick unto sick unto death and wanted to see his father. But my husband could not travel. He also lay sick by now, with a kidney infection. So we quickly decided that Marieche should go, and my husband’s brother Jakob Toews.

Our neighbour, Bernhard Penner, took them to the rail-head and also went to Puerto Casado to visit our son. This was a very heavy sorrowful time for us because at home our daughter Sara, fourteen years old, also lay sick with the typhus, and then our Lena, four years old, came down with the same. There were no doctors in the Chaco. We had a little Rawleigh’s medicine yet but it did not help much.

Then on the sixteenth of October our son David was born. Our neighbour women, David Peters’ wife and Jakob Zacharias’s wife, took over at our place with all the little ones and the sick ones. They were such a wonderful help to us.

When our baby was ten days old Fred Engen came from Puerto Casado with the message that our Bernhard had taken a turn for the worse and was bleeding internally, very close to death. Fred told us Bernhard wanted to see his father and that my husband should come with him if at all possible.

My husband went with Fred to the rail-head and from there by train. It was springtime now and had rained much so everyone was planting as much as they could. Our fifteen-year-old son, Herman, also tried to work our land but he had great troubles with the unruly oxen (er hat sich sehr mit den unbändigen Oxen gequält beim Pflügen). Sara and Lena had both gotten better and were out of bed and I also felt stronger already so we could be up and about.

We got a message from Puerto Casado saying that my husband had arrived to be with our Bernhard. The message said Bernhard was not only alive, but that he had started to get somewhat better, although he was still too weak to travel home. For this news I was unspeakably grateful to our Father in heaven.

The day before we got this message our best milk cow had died after coming in from the pasture and drinking herself too full of water. The messenger from Puerto Casado told me not to get discouraged. As in Job’s time, the blessing would come again after these troubles, and I believed him because I know that everything comes from God, health as well as sickness, plenty as well as need.

After Bernhard began to get better my husband came home from Puerto Casado, leaving Marieche with him to care for him. Bernhard could barely eat anything yet, and the two of them stayed in the empty immigration barracks alone. They set up a tent inside the barracks because of all the mosquitoes and other insects.

During this time my son passed through a great struggle regarding the state of his soul, but he came through it victoriously. He promised the Lord that if he survived this illness he would spend his life declaring the Gospel of salvation in the Chaco, and that is now his vocation. 

Two days before Christmas our children came home. Bernhard had been gone three months. By the time they got here he was swollen badly. The trip, by ox-cart through standing water much of the way, had been really hard on him. But after several days the swelling went down again. Through the grace of God, through his great love and mercy, we had a joyful reunion this Weihnachten (holy night), for which I still praise him and thank him with all my heart.

It rained four inches on the first day of Christmas. On the second day of Christmas we drove to Laubenheim to visit my husband’s brother Jakob Toews and his family. But when we came to within a kilometre of that village we got stuck in a swampy place on the narrow trail through the jungle. All we could see was dense foliage and water. My husband and our nine-year-old son, Hein, took off their shoes, rolled up their trousers and unhitched the oxen. They tethered the oxen to a tree and waded the rest of the way to Laubenheim to Johann Toews’s place for help. I stayed sitting on the wagon with the baby and the five little ones. There were very many mosquitoes and the children got restless.

The men came back with another yoke of oxen and a long chain. They pulled us out of the swamp but it was noon by the time we got to Johann Toews’s place. After the meal we sang and the children said their Wünschen (memorised poetry for the occasion). At Vesper time we had watermelons and sang some more. The watermelons were so sweet and good. It was warm, totally unlike what we were used to for Christmas. By evening the men had chopped a new trail around the swamp so we got safely home.

After Christmas we replanted everything because the ants had eaten what we planted before. Once more we planted beans and Kaffir corn, peanuts, melons, and other things. Everything grew nicely and we had enough to eat.

During February and March we built ourselves a granary that we first used as a house. We made our own bricks and got all out timber from the bush. We used the same doors and windows we had made in Loma Plata. In that building we had one large room in which we ate, and two small rooms. The older children still slept in tents outside, but the tents had gotten shabby from long use, from the rain and the sun.

We had much rain in April and the days were getting shorter and cooler. That is when we could plant vegetables. The rest of the year it is too hot. Now we could plant tomatoes, onions, cabbage, beets, parsley, dill, summer savoury (Pfefferkraut), beans and cucumbers. This month my husband travelled to Asuncion for supplies. Herman, who had turned sixteen, turned sick with the fever and got so low we had to stay with him day and night. We, and also he, thought he would die. But our loving Father in heaven brought about a change and gave our son’s health back to him again.

By the time my husband got back, safe and sound, after a month’s absence, Herman was just able to get out of bed again. For this, and for all of God’s mercies through this time, I still praise and thank him with all my heart.

In the month of May, 1929, Lengua people came out of the bush and wanted food. So we got them to help us clear the jungle and cut trees with which we could build a house. In the beginning we did not understand each other and they did not know how we worked. Everything had to be learned. But they became good with the machete and the axe. In exchange for their work we fed them, but we did not have much either. We gave them watermelons and peanuts for breakfast, or cooked a porridge for them of Kaffir corn. For the noon meal we fed them beans and corn or mandioca, all from our own garden. They always had their own meat as they were great hunters. With their bows and arrows they caught wild pigs and deer. They also ate lizards, snakes, moles, grubs, parrots and anteaters. They prepared their own food as they liked it (nach ihrem Geschmack). They drank yerba tea.

The Lengua lived in the jungle in little shelters of grass and brush, just enough to give them shelter from the rain. They slept on the ground and sat on the ground to eat. They never lived at one place for long, but kept moving about. They never had more stuff than what their women could carry in a bundle on top of their heads. The men go around all the time with their bows and their dogs. They never have more than one or two children.

When we started giving the Lenguas work and food, their women also came out of the jungle. We offered them dresses for a week’s work (besides the food they ate). They were very happy for that, as they had never worn clothes like we do. All they had were animal skins for a little covering. After several years the younger Lengua women were making nice dresses for themselves, everything sewn by hand. My girls and I made many dresses for the Lengua women in the beginning.

Lengua Camp after they learned from the Mennonites how to build houses and wear clothes.

The way the Lenguas cleared our land was like this. The women dug around the roots of a tree. Then the men chopped off the roots and the tree fell over. All the branches were then chopped or broken off and piled up. Then, when the wood dried and a hot north wind blew we burned it. In our first year at Waldheim my husband and the boys, working with the Lengua, cleared 25 acres of camp land.

My husband brought a long cross-cut saw back from Asunción. With this we set up a saw-mill. One of the boys standing on top of the log, one in a hole underneath to saw off the boards. The Lengua soon learned how to help with this too.

To mix the mud to make the bricks for our house we took a bottle tree and hollowed it out. Inside this the men made a rotating screw, powered by the oxen walking around it, pushing a long pole. Four or five Lenguas helped us to make the bricks by pressing the mixture into wooden forms. We often managed to make over a thousand bricks in a day, but sometimes it rained and spoiled the bricks before they dried.

We built our house that first summer and had enough corrugated iron for the roof. But the sheds, stables and chicken house we covered with bundles of reeds for thatch. Building in the Chaco was not expensive but it took much, much work (es war aber mit sehr viel, viel schwerer Arbeit verbunden). 

Heinrich and Maria Toews (on the left) in front of the house they built at Waldheim, with their twelve children, their sons and daughters in law, and the first of their grandchildren. The two youngest ones of Heinrich and Maria's family, Neta and Erdmann, were born in Paraguay. Bernhard W. Toews, who served for many years as a teacher and evangelist among the Lengua people, stands with his wife Anni and children next to Maria (in the dark dress).

The timber was very difficult to work with, so hard and heavy. My husband managed that while the boys laid up the brick walls.

All of us built porches around our houses to keep the walls shaded from the sun and the rooms inside cool. The porches also protected the mud-brick walls that we plastered with clay and sand and whitewashed with lime. Some of the lime was reddish and the houses looked very nice. We made a large lawn around our house, and planted many trees. Our house was nice and had lots of room.

In our village, Waldheim, we built a school and had worship meetings in it on the Lord’s Day. Laubenheim also had a school and we took turns with the worship meetings. We had school during the winter months.

The mothers of our villages put much effort and time into making things for the children to bring them a little joy at Christmas. Over the noon hour, when it was too hot to work in the garden, we sewed and made dolls for the little girls. From Canada we had brought a few dolls with tin heads. Every Christmas I repainted the heads and made new clothes for the dolls. That brought the little ones much joy.

Later, after our little girls grew older, our neighbour women took those tin doll heads apart and used them as a mould to make more. They mixed sawdust from Palo Santo wood with white flour that had gotten old and made a plaster out of it. This they pressed into the tin and when it had dried they could paint eyes, a mouth and hair onto the heads. Then with scraps of cloth and cotton they made nice dolls. Many of these got sold yet, and they looked cute.

We made bowls and plates out of this sawdust and flour mixture that our little girls could use for tea sets. Also toy washtubs and scrubbing boards. Out of wood the older boys made small cars and trucks with wheels and painted them for the younger ones.

We made all our clothing during the noon hours when it was too hot to work outside. We had a sewing machine but many others did not, so they came to sew at our place. Not only dresses, but our men’s suits and coats we made too. We couldn’t buy any clothing during those first years.

We made all our own furniture, but later there were carpenters in the colony that made good furniture to sell. All of our buggies and wagons, our cultivators and seed drills were also made on the colony. Out of the leather we tanned we made our own horse harnesses. Everything was cheap but not easy. The smiths had to make the coal for their forges out of very hard quebracho (axe-breaker) wood. Our boys helped a lot to make these coals (charcoal) that burned very well. We used them in the sad irons with which we ironed our clothes. We ordered those irons from Asunción.

Our cooking stoves we made out of mud bricks inside the house, and we had our bake ovens, also of bricks, outside. Twenty-five years later we have a burnt-brick cookstove with an oven built right into our house. Our son-in-law, Heinrich Fehr, was the first one to build one of these.

The Lengua around us lived much simpler than what we did, and with a lot less work. They just made a shelter with sticks and covered it with grass to sleep under. They were only under their roofs to sleep or when it rained. They hung their kettle over the fire outside. These people are contented and happy, also very hospitable when one comes to visit them.

We got our flour, for the first while, in burlap sacks. It was good flour but often with a lot of insects in it, and when it did not reach we put Kaffir flour into it. That tasted good and made nice bread. In the beginning both flour and sugar got rationed out per person, in the colony. It was very scarce. But we usually had enough sweet potatoes, mandioca and beans. Meat was often scarce in the beginning too, until we had our own cattle, pigs and chickens. Fruit was missing in the early years but now we have much of it, oranges, tangerines, lemons, grapes, guayabas, bananas, grapefruits, pineapples, figs, dates and pomegranates. But we cannot raise apples, plums, cherries, or strawberries in the Chaco—nor rhubarb. Guayabas are a very good fruit and did well. We cooked much syrup from the sugar cane we grew. It tasted good.

Kerosene to burn in our lamps was often scarce in the beginning. Often we had none. Then we sat during long evenings sewing or mending with a poor light, tallow candles or lamps burning peanut oil. We made a wick with old cloth sewed together, laid it into a can of peanut oil, and lit it. That made a weak light. We often made a palo santo fire outside in the evenings and sat around it. That was much brighter. If there was a wind it often blew out our lamps, but after several years we got good lamps and lanterns. Some got the ones with mantles but we never did. 

In 1930 the first Mennonite refugees from Russia began to come to the Chaco. They settled beside us, to the west and called their colony Fernheim (faraway home). A large mud-brick building got put up in the village of Rosenfeld to serve as an immigrant hostel and our people dug a well. Men from our colony fetched those families from the rail-head with oxen and wagons. They had suffered so much during the revolution in Russia. But we were still poor and could not give them much either. Only three years in Paraguay ourselves, we had barely had any income yet. But we shared what seeds and plants and chickens we had.

By 1931 we had a very nice garden, a good crop of Kaffir corn and ten acres of cotton. The cotton was a lot of work. There were so many caterpillars. All summer we had to go along and paint the plants with little grass brushes we had made, or with the plumes of the Kaffir corn. We painted the cotton with Paris Green, but in the end the price was low and we did not get much money for it, two pesos a kilo. Later our colony set up its own cotton gin at Loma Plata.

We threshed all our Kaffir corn with sticks and flails in the beginning. But later our people made threshing machines. That was really handy and saved us so much work.

During 1931, after I had turned forty, I turned sick. I had extreme pains in my stomach and in my back and lost much weight. I was bringing up blood and sometimes passed out from the pain. We had no doctor yet in our colony, nor in Fernheim so we decided to make the long trip to Puerto Casado. It was November and because of the heavy rains the road was bad. My husband and our son Herman made an awning over the wagon and laid a mattress in it for me. Then Herman hauled me out to the rail-head with the oxen.

The first night on the way we spent at Hoffnungsfeld where they had set up a cotton gin. David K. Fehr, who was out there running the gin, let us e his room. He had serious doubts about whether I would survive the rest of the journey, but the next morning I felt somewhat better.

By the second night we reached Pozo Azul. I was in great pain again and we stayed with Paraguayan people. They let us sleep in their house and gave me boiled milk. We had some roasted Zwieback along from home.

The road from this place onward got steadily worse. The mud were so deep and the wagon tipped so badly at times I was sure it would roll over. The next night we got to the Casado cattle station at Palo Santo. There too the Paraguayans were friendly to us and gave us boiled milk. They even gave us some to take along for which I was very thankful. It was the only thing I could keep down anymore.

That next night (after we had come to the rail-head) the pain got very bad. I was really tired from the long trip but they gave me a net to keep off the mosquitoes and we felt strengthened through prayer and the knowledge that God was with us on our journey. The next morning it was somewhat better and through God’s grace, love and mercy we boarded the train. My husband made a blanket bed for me on the bench and covered me with the mosquito netting to protect my feet and hands. I could not cover my face, however, because it was too hot, so he sat and fanned away mosquitoes for the whole trip. That night we got to Puerto Casado.

The next morning my husband went to see old Father Casado (the man who had sold us our land in the Chaco). He had mercy on us and sent for a doctor right away, along with an interpreter that knew German. The doctor said I had kidney stones and he gave us medicine.

We stayed in Puerto Casado two weeks. The medicine was so strong it kept me down for a while but I got rid of the stones. Then, through God’s grace my health was restored, for which I am still deeply grateful.

In 1932 we saw an aeroplane for the first time in the Chaco. A few Lengua people worked on our place at the time. They saw it first and fled for the bush. The plane flew low over the trees and we learned that it came from Bolivia.

A few weeks later a Paraguayan came to us in Waldheim and said there would be war, Paraguay against Bolivia. But we did not believe it right away, and thought the Bolivian border was far off. Then one day our cows wandered off and my husband with our son Hein went looking for them. They found soldiers making a road from Isla Poi to Hoffnungsfeld. The commander said they would need it for the war, and the fighting began in March, 1932.

Now we saw more aeroplanes, as the Isla Poi military camp lay only eight kilometres from Waldheim, and they set up another one at Hoffnungsfeld. The military set up hospitals there and started butchering cattle and baking bread to feed the men.

At this time we had a wedding for our daughter Mariechen. She was 22 years old and married David K. Fehrs’ son Jakob (Jasch). A few months later, in July, our Bernhard married his sister, Anni. And in August our daughter Sara married Heinrich Fehr from Laubenheim. We had to work hard to get them all set up with what they needed.

Three months later we celebrated our silver anniversary, but not many people could come. It was a busy time, and everyone was still so poor. We only got around with oxen and the fighting was at its worst. Hungry soldiers kept coming into our villages for bread and fresh things from the garden. Every morning they came for milk, and they got eggs, chickens and pigs from us. They traded yerba mate, galletas, sugar, rice and soap for those things. Also meat.

The soldiers stole our watermelons but they didn’t harm us much. They had gotten strict orders to leave us alone. Our leaders warned our young people, especially the girls, to stay off the streets, and all the more so after dark. Soldiers were always about and some came into our villages just to look around.

One night five soldiers came upon some of our young people in the village of Chortitz. They grabbed widower Abram Giesbrecht’s daughter and took her with them, but so many people came out of the village they let her go and she ran home. Then they shot Abram Giesbrecht there on the street. Oh, that was a hard time for those children. Now they had neither a mother nor a father.

The soldiers also took cattle from us and we never saw it again. Then, when the Bolivians drove the Paraguayans back, the front came right up to our colony. During the night before Christmas, 1933, we heard the cannons. But after that the war went the other way and Paraguay finally won. We thanked and praised God that there was peace again.

On 6 August 1935 our son Herman married Elisabeth Funk. The wedding was at her parents, Johann Funk’s place, in the village of Neuanlage.

There are many poisonous snakes in the Chaco. The first time any of us got bitten was when we still lived in the camp at Loma Plata. My husband was working at our new village site, over 27 km away, when at eight o’clock in the evening our daughter Lena went to get a drink from the barrel and stepped on a snake. She was only four years old and it was altogether dark. She screamed and I took the lantern to go see what was wrong. There lay the snake, coiled up. Only the little children were home with me so I ran to get the hoe and chopped it dead. Our son Bernhard came home from the neighbours and bound up the foot, but Lena cried terribly from the pain. We sent a messenger on horseback to get my husband right away, and I put her foot in a bucket with water and flour-paste. In a few hours the foot had swollen and turned hard and white, the swelling going up beyond the bandage that Bernhard had put on. So he loosened it and made another bandage further up. Pretty soon the whole leg was hard and stiff. The poor child screamed all night for the pain. By five o’clock in the morning she started to get convulsions and to throw up violently. Three times in half an hour she brought up the green poison, then she calmed down and went to sleep. Many were the prayers we sent up to God that night.

By seven in the morning my husband came home. Lena needed to stay in bed for a long time yet and the leg was so painful it could not be touched or moved. It took two months until she could walk again. But then our dear little daughter was totally healed through God’s grace, his love and his never-failing mercy.

Peter Klassen’s wife from the village of Halbstadt, Johann Guenther’s wife from Osterwick, and Gerhard Doerksen’s wife from Gnadenfeld (the one that had brought the cookies at Christmas when we still lived in Loma Plata) all died of snake bite.  My husband got bitten too, on a business trip to Puerto Piñasco with our son-in-law Jasch Fehr. They walked down to the docks after dark and a snake bit my husband’s foot, through his left boot. People quickly hunted the snake with a torch to find out what kind it was so they could treat the bite. He had to stay several days in Piñasco and also several days in Puerto Casado before attempting the long trip home. Then, through many prayers and the grace of God he could greet his family again. I still thank God for that too.

Through this time I often thought of the verse: “The Lord teaches us not only through goodness but also through severity. For the one whom he loves he disciplines.” As long as we are healthy we are often too busy to draw close to God, but when we are sick we find strength and comfort in him. When we become helpless we have no other place to look but to God, and he can speak with us then.

We had a problem with jaguars taking our cattle during that time. I saw these animals close up while driving, but they never attacked any of us. The Lengua people were much afraid of them. The ocelots made much trouble when they got into our chicken coop but they also have very beautiful fur. Armadillos dug up our peanuts and ate them. They are funny little animals that roll up into a ball when you touch them, all coated with plates of armour.

On 30 July, 1939 our son Heinrich married Peter Falks’ daughter Tina, at their home in Neuanlage. Then on 26 December 1943 our Tina married Heinrich Unger in Laubenheim.

During the winter the parrots and other birds came in big flocks from the south and ate our crops. We needed to keep people in the fields from very early in the morning to scare them away. Whoever did not watch his fields of Kaffir corn did not get any harvest at all. The little parrots were the worst of all (furchtbar mit den Vögeln in Waldheim, besonders die kleinen grünen Papageien).

On the way to the rail-head we saw very long-legged red and white birds. I do not know their name, but their beaks were about as long as the bird itself. We also had storks and wild ostriches (rheas) and many buzzards, such great flocks descending upon a dead animal that one could see nothing of it for the buzzards. For several years we had trouble with locusts. They came in such big swarms it sounded as if a storm was coming. They ate everything that was green, including all the leaves off the citrus trees, and sometimes even the tender branches. They ate our cotton and in the garden they even ate entire watermelons and onions into the ground. We made ditches and chased the locusts into them and buried them, but we could not get nearly all of them. After they left we had to plant again, and sometimes got a good crop yet.

Sometimes we had locusts six or seven years in a row, but we also had good years in between with none at all.

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Peter
 
Rocky Cape Christian Community
19509 Bass Highway
Detention River, Tasmania 7321
Australia
www.thecommonlife.com.au