Helping a Single Mennonite Mom
Her brown eyes shone with pleasure as I praised her work and her skill at handling the power tools. Throughout the day I caught her whispering to herself, Yes I can! I know I can! See? I told you you could! Meticulously she measured the boards, clamped them and carefully slid the electric saw. She quickly caught on to the trick of handling the nail gun and thoroughly enjoyed the jigsaw and sander.
I smiled to myself, and felt glad that in some small way we could help this young Mennonite mom regain her self-confidence and restore her dignity after all the sexual and domestic abuse she had been through, growing up in a strictly traditional church. We shared our lunch and supper with her several times and visited her home with small gifts here and there.
She entered our home several months ago. Now she has left. What her future plans are we don’t know. Last we heard she is happily reunited with her family.
Yet the stories she shared with us have deeply disturbed us, sometimes outright shocked us. We made it clear we would never pry into her life or share gossip with her. She agreed and chattered as she worked. Most of what she spoke went in one ear and out the other. Often I simply grunted or mumbled a response. Until one day she said, “There’s more of them, actually.”
“More what?”
“Weren’t you listening?”
“Not really.”
She sighed. “A farmer from Shipyard tried to force himself on his own teenage daughter a few months ago. She resisted and said she did not want to commit such an immoral act with her father. Eventually she escaped. He pursued her but being drunk, lost his way and ‘accidentally’ drowned in a pond.”
I looked at her. “We’ll never know, will we?”
Nodding, she continued. “The family of the girl’s boyfriend were the ones who supposedly discovered him.”
Both of us were silent. Then she shrugged. “Anyways, there’s more actually. Teen girls who are abused by their own fathers. I honestly don’t know that much about the Old Colony Mennonites here in Belize but if they’re anything like the ones I grew up with back home, then I can assure you these things happen more often than you think.” Her home is, or was, several thousand miles away.
After this conversation I embarked on an unofficial quest, attempting to find out the darker side of Shipyard and Little Belize, to discover for myself some of the rumours I had heard. Of hastily arranged marriages due to unexpected teen pregnancies, of government agencies removing children from homes because of the father abusing his own daughters, of police arresting older men for attempted rape. How much is true and how much is just plain gossip? Those who have left the Old Colony readily and bitterly claim it’s all true, yet quite obviously those inside the church group will deny and label it as gossip.
More importantly, how do I quietly and inconspicously gather information on these sensitive subjects directly from the residents themselves without being outright nosy? It is an ongoing process with no specific deadline. We’ll see how it turns out or if I will even get to write about it.
A. Mendoza
