MennoLink Books and Music

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 2009 Christian Aid Ministries

When Dr. Gerald L. Miller left his Markle, Indiana, family practice to respond to an urgent need for a doctor at the Jamama Hospital, he faced the challenge of understanding an Islamic culture much different from his own and of dealing with medical situations unlike any he had encountered: village children attacked by a mad dog, a psychotic woman chained to a stake, infants dead from malaria, banana workers bitten by venomous snakes. Not only did Miller respond readily and with compassion, he also acted with ingenuity, discovering, for example, that the malaria organism was crossing the placental barrier.

Throughout a year of challenges, Dr. Miller had his Mennonite faith and the abiding support of Somali hospital staff and mission personnel to sustain him. Readers will be moved by the climax of this drama, a surprising outcome involving the actions of a single Somali family.

Copyright 2009 Cascadia Publishing House

Copyright 2008 Herald Press

In t he midst of this darkness, they found joy, love, lasting friendships, and hearts open to the light of God's love. They saw beauty in t he scarred landscape around them, and the tears of heaven in the torrential African rains. As they worked to help change the lives of those around them, their own lives were changed, and the miracles they witnessed increased their awe of the God they had gone to Africa to serve.

Copyright Christian Aid Ministries 2006

Copyright 2004. Good Books