Cultivating faith on the Chaco: enduring decades of hardship, Mennonite immigrants built communities that today prosper in this desolate region of Paraguay.

• Author: Goodman, Joshua

At dusk, the sun is a blazing red ball beyond the flat, shimmering horizon. Like muffled church bells calling worshipers to prayer, the clickety-clank of empty, metal milk vats being unloaded reverberates in the oppressive evening air peculiar to the Chaco desert. Calmly and quietly, within five minutes, farmers begin to arrive from all directions to deliver the day's produce. There's sunburnt Fred Reimer, his characteristic straight-faced, sedulous self, lugging his cans on a beat-up tractor. Next comes beaming John Simons, stylish in Ns Michael Jordan cap, happy to josh in perfect English about the homesickness he felt for the Chaco's 120-degree heat during his short-lived sabbatical in Canada. Then arrive two blond-haired children pulled in a small wagon by their mother's motorcycle. To each and every homesteader, my good-natured host, twenty-eight-year-old truck driver Werni Wiebe, extends a hearty hello in a guttural, Plattdeutsch (Low German) dialect before continuing on his twice-daily milk run.

Two hours away, along a labyrinth of zigzagging, dirt roads, in the settlement of Loma Plata, the twilight sights and sounds are more varied, but none the more hurried. As a German waltz floats on the heavy, lifeless air entire families gather on long, gabled verandas to recount the day's activities. On the Tallerstrasse, milky-white garage mechanics partaking in a well-deserved break sip Paraguayan yerba mate tea from a metal straw. A robust middle-aged man with the hale of someone half his age stretches his sturdy arms high to clean the tall windows of the whitewashed church in advance of Sunday services.

"Things weren't always as modern and carefree as they look today," ninety-two-year-old Elizabeth Toews would tell me later, with a gentle, knowing smile, from the porch of the Wohnheim Eben-Ezer senior citizens home. "Life is good now, but in the beginning we made a lot of sacrifices."

In the beginning. I was to hear that phrase a lot among the Mennonites of Paraguay's Chaco. Some seventy-five years before, when Toews was seventeen, nobody by their own free will would've come to the Chaco, the isolated backwaters of a little-known Paraguay. But the Mennonites weren't coming here on their own free will. Opposition to this group of German-speaking, Christian radicals was once again flourishing in Europe and North America. The half-million Mennonites spread about the world are Anabaptists, believing in adult rather than infant baptism. Although innocuous enough today, the belief that faith should be more than a birthright got them into big trouble in sixteenth-century Switzerland and Holland. As pacifists, and defenders of a strict separation between church and state, they'd been on the move ever since sixteenth-century spiritual leader Menno Simons lashed out against the Lutheran reformers of the day as too political minded and conservative.

Now circumstances were forcing them to seek refuge again. World War I had generated a strong mistrust of all things German in Canada. Although Mennonite farms had prospered since their arrival on the prairies of Manitoba and Saskatchewan in the 1870s, the government's decision to repeal their exemption from educating their children in English struck at the core of their moral and spiritual fabric. Finally, deliverance from their open-ended exodus came in the form of a no-strings-attached invitation to settle in far-away Paraguay. After repeated deceptions, the end to a half-millennium's worth of rootlessness looked near. In a short document called the Privilegium, Paraguay met the Mennonites' only condition--to be left alone. Almost overnight, Toews, her parents, and nine siblings, together with fifty-one other families, packed their bags and set off to South America.

There was one hitch, though. Instead of flowing with milk and honey, the Mennonites' Promised Land was a sun-scorched wasteland so abhorrent and inhospitable for human settlement that not even the far-sweeping Spanish conquerors dared venture into it. The region's emblematic tree is the drought-resistant palo borracho (literally "drunken pole") tree, whose pot-bellied trunk seems to suggest the lassitude that settlers from more frigid climes must have felt when they reached these tropical swamplands. The first Europeans to step foot in the Chaco appropriately described the alternately dry and flooded, always sweltering...