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A major economic metamorphosis happened in the Paraguayan Chaco beginning in the 1960's. It followed thirty years of hardship and little progress for Mennonite immigrants from Canada and Mennonite refugees from Russia. The effort to settle an indigenous population greater than the Mennonite population in the succeeding thirty years makes this a curious event in world history.

In 1951 William T. Snyder, Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) Associate Executive Secretary, recruited a Mennonite couple graduating that year from Bethel College in Kansas, to manage a joint venture experimental farm in Fernheim Colony, Paraguay. It almost didn't work out. The Unruhs tried to disconnect from MCC after their first five year term expired, the working environment and living conditions so difficult; the Chaco was known as a 'Green Hell.' But they were moved to return and spent their working lives in the Chaco, 32 years altogether until illness intervened, along the way endearing themselves to the Mennonite settlers and to the native Indians.

Given the human yearning for precise explanations and an authoritative point of origin, the reader is taken by surprise encountering restraint, gentleness and straightforward reasoning in this gradual and complex evolutionary development. Leadership spontaneously rises to the occasion in a prosaic manner; scrupulously methodical, patient, nonassertive and nonjudgmental. This self-effacing style gave few persons in North America a clue-as it was happening-that the depth of the Unruh's imprint on Mennonite ethnicity in Paraguay might be significant or lasting.

Copyright 2009 Philip Roth