new kind of mennoland

Hello everyone! Since I last posted, my mother and I made it safely to Paraguay where Mennonite World Conference has come and gone and now I´m writing from just inside Brazil at a hostal close to Iguazu Falls. MWC was a pretty good week. I will admit that it was not as good as I was hoping. I really enjoyed getting to see a variety of people that I have not seen in a while and live a world away (literally for some), I attended some fabulous workshops and enjoyed seeing some of the Paraguayan Mennonite context. However, the plenary sessions were disappointing and at times just downright boring. Part of this was due to translation challenges, part was due to what I thought was an excessive amount of talking and quite frankly, not very good preachers - although I found 3 speakers to be very excellent. The biggest issue that came to the fore for me at MWC was the imbalance in attenders. There were almost 2000 North Americans and not even 200 Africans in attendance which is in opposition to the number of Mennonite living in these continents, respectively. I am hoping to reflect on this further with other participants and consider how we might work at changing this for next time, if there is another world gathering planned.

I am now visiting my mother´s cousins in one of the Old Colony Mennonite colonies in Rio Verde, Paraguay. My uncle, aunt, mother and I are staying with cousins for our final week here. It has been quite fascinating so far. The majority of the family is still a part of the Old Colony church and we have spent the last two days hopping from one home to another, meeting people, eating good food and me listening to a lot of low German and observing what life is like here. The family we are staying with is no longer a part of the Old Colony group so this has also been very interesting. They are the ones we are here in Brazil with. I am really enjoying getting to know them. An example of the many paradoxes of life here is last night at dinner when one of my cousins pulled out there laptop and I found out that they have wi-fi set up in their house! So in addition to everyone having cell phones, here we were in a home with pretty basic hydro with women still in traditional dress checking our email and adding each other as friends on facebook.

I will reflect on this experience more once I am back in the States. For now I will stop here to let others use the internet. We are headed to the Argentinian side of the falls tomorrow and I´m pretty excited to have another day of hiking and exploring the jungle around the falls. Friday we head back to the colony for one more night, then into Asuncion for our final day before heading back to the States. I look forward to seeing many of you soon!