July Menno Bote: some hot topics

The July 2012 Menno Bote, published by MCC Bolivia, is going into colony mailboxes this morning. In addition to the usual columns, this issue features a photo spread with extended captions of Willmar and Hannah's travels to/in North America: Panama Canal, Central Valley (California) agriculture and irrigation, and sightseeing in the Grand Canyon area. There is a report from a recent conservation agriculture workshop put on by MCC and partners in Honduras, which the Rural Programs coordinator of MCC Bolivia attended. There is an article describing life in Del Sur colony, written by one of its members.

Phil Bender, our political analyst of sorts, also wrote a third article in a series describing Bolivia's indigenous people. The focus this time is on the Ayoreos (also called Moros), a lowland group that has lived in the Bolivian and Paraguayan chacos for hundreds of years and were relatively less "touched" by the Spanish over time. In fact, the advocacy group Survival International noted that Paraguay’s Department of Indian Affairs confirmed in February 2012 that an uncontacted Ayoreo tribe was living on farmland in the northern Chaco region. The photo above-left shows the house of previously uncontacted people, which was discovered when a road was bulldozed through the area by the company.

Another interesting, perhaps controversial, aspect of this Menno Bote are two articles touching on the sensitive topic of colony Mennonites and schooling. One article, taken from the small book Geschichte der Mennoniten (compiled by Abram Unrau), describes how Durango Colony began in Mexico in 1924. It points out that the Old Colonists in Canada were increasingly leary of the government requiring the use of English and approved school material in colony schools; this is suggested as a primary motivation for moving to Mexico. So that is one article in this issue.

On another page is a recent article lifted directly from the pages of El Deber, the main newspaper of Santa Cruz, around which most of the Bolivian colonies are clustered. This article is entitled “Mennonites included in the national education system: The Bolivian government is committed to improving education” (my translation). It reports that the Mennonite school, supported by the EMMC and other missionary groups, in the Villa Nueva community near Pailón is now an officially recognized school in Bolivia. The article has many interesting details, one of which is that on the occasion of signing the official documents, "the students sang the national and cruceño anthems in Spanish and in their native language" (my translation). The article also makes several references to Bolivia's committment to respecting the culture, customs, traditions, and religion of the Mennonites.

Here's a photo of the school, when MCC visited it a few months ago.

This is interesting stuff (I'll leave the analysis up to you readers). "Oh the times, they are a changin'..." (Bob Dylan).