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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

copyright 2000.

Christmas Carol Kauffman was born 25 December 1901 in Elkhart, IN, the second of four daughters of Abraham R. and Selena Bell (Wade) Miller. She graduated from Elkhart High School and attended Goshen College and Hesston College. She began writing at Hesson and for years she wrote one short story every month for a weekly youth magazine published by Herald Press, completing more than 100 stories.

This is a story of Christmas Carol Kauffman's remarkable life as researched and reassembled after sorting through mountains of correspondence and relived through countless hours of interviews conducted by the author. This book leads the reader through crushing trials and bitter disappointments to the quiet peace and comfort Carol always found, never failing, in her Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Copyright 2008

Copyright 2008 Herald Press

This biographical narrative by Christmas Carol Kauffman will let its readers feel the emotions of David Grant as he grows into manhood. They will realize what it means for a child not to know who he really is; what it is like to face the possibility of being illegitimate; how difficult it is to be convinced that his foster parents really care, even when they are the kindest people in the world.

Besides David, there are osme other people worth meeting; Sister Lora, first to each David the meaning of love and acceptance; Miss Ranger, the teacher who understands; and --somewhere--a lonely mother who wonders what has happened to her baby boy. Reprinted 2008 A. B. Publishing

Copyright 2008 Faith Builders Resource Group

Copyright 1995 Herald Press

Copyright 2008 Herald Press

Copyright 2008 Pandora Press

The Mennonites who settled in Russia kept their language, their religion, and their culture intact. But as the nineteenth century drew to a close, Mennonite community identity was increasingly seen as a threat. There was first a drive for russification under the Czars; there then was increasing suspicion of all things German with the outbreak of the First World War; and finally the Bolshevik Revolution brought Christianity and prosperity into question. The Second World War and its brutal Stalinist aftermath succeeded in destroying life in the Mennonite colonies.

The first person accounts translated here tell the stories of people who almost miraculously survived successive waves of revolution, civil war, assassination, economic and political purges, and arbitrary arrest and banishment. The stories of these survivors are just now beginning to be published, in both German and Russian.

Sarah Dyck's selection and skillful translation of these memoirs opens a rare window through which English readers can begin to grasp the reality of life in the Soviet empire for those judged to be enemies of the People. These stories provide graphic and personal documentation of a land and a people in turmoil.