Henry was like a Granddad character in a children’s book. He had a thin little face made perfectly round by his bowl cut white hair and his bushy white beard. He was wearing a very grubby faded green shirt that was stained with sweat in an ‘x’ shaped down his back, you could see it framing the braces perfectly. He had a pair of brown thick spectacles on and down the side of his nose a huge dirty elastoplast plaster, applied for function with no thought to aesthetics. He greeted us with a warm and wide grin and assured us straight away that we were ‘very very welcome.’ I remember warming to him instantly, he didn’t seem quite as strange and stiff as the other people we had so far encountered. Although I remember thinking that he was possibly a bit daft, in that endearing and eccentric way that only the very old can be.
On first impressions Henrys house was huge, too huge for someone so small and old. However we soon learned that the house was the home of his daughter and her family. He showed us around his home; a tiny elevated wood hut in the garden, with a bed in one corner a cupboard and writing desk piled high with papers in the other and three school tables down the centre. It seemed he not only lived in less then 3 meters squared, he also taught three local, non Mennonite boys there too (“They didn’t get into the school and I couldn’t see them go without the basics of an education.”).
His daughter and her family were away visiting family for the weekend and it was to my monumental relief that Henry informed us that this meant we could stay in the large house that night. Not before long I was stood in the garden watching Jonathan and Henry ‘do the chores,’ milking cows, feeding chickens and guinea pigs. As I was stood there I noticed a man walking with a horse up on the main road and I don’t know why but I waved to him, almost as if I was a local. He waved back, raining his had above his head in that slow unsure way you do when you are not quite sure what you’re witnessing but know a response is required. He then tied up his horse and bumbled down the field to inspect a little further. He turned out to be Henrys son, Cornelius.
He was a somewhat ‘stout’ gentleman with reddish blonde hair (standard issue bowl cut) and a particularly bushy gingery beard. He had a very pronounced overbite with a tooth missing and a few of the others almost completely black. He had a big rosy cheeks and a smile that almost never left his face. He punctuated most of his speech with great laugh which came out nervously as he finished a sentence; he seemed to laugh with the whole of his body. I can’t be sure if it was because I was reading Lord of the Rings or not but I wondered if this was not what a hobbit looked like. Before long he had invited us to his house the next day to watch him plough and have lunch with his family. We of course accepted, he was so nice I couldn’t imagine refusing.
Night had seemed to creep up on us very suddenly and after he had said our goodbyes we retreated to Henrys little hut to eat a bizarre collection of mangoes, beans, bananas and whatever else he could find to give us. In the sparse little hut there was no cooker or means of preparing anything so we ate the food out of metal bowls freshly skinned with a knife. Comparing this meal with the one we had had in Lower Barton Creek it struck me that either there was living simply and there was ‘living Henry’ or Peters family had surely been sinners.
Conversation turned quickly to faith and it quickly became clear that we would have to jump the invisible gaps between us. Henry almost had a tendency to preach which made me feel both irritated and very uncomfortable. He would frequently get lost in a story which appeared to have no end but would always serve to show us how much God loved us. Henry it seemed was one of the original people who had moved from Spanish Lookout over to Barton Creek to live a more simple life. “We had become too prosperous” he said, a statement Jonathan and I would repeat again and again in our later conversations about our experiences. How many communities do you know of that pick up and resettle because they have become ‘too prosperous?’ It was a truly amazing thing to hear.
We did learn a little more about the structure of the community, how things are decided democratically through meetings lead by democratically elected pastors. How there is a village store to provide only those things which the community cannot make for themselves, boots, shoelaces, kerosene, toothpaste, soap and toilet paper, the latter three Henry feels are not completely necessary. After what seemed like hours of talking by the light of only a Kerosene lamp we discovered that although it was only 9pm we were all extremely tired. We were shown to our sleeping places in the large house; mine was on a high bed in a laundry room with pair after pair of hand stitched shirts and braced pants in every scale and size imaginable but inches about my head. All around me was the smell of warm milk I had been aware off since arriving, the smell of babies and of course the unavoidable smell that comes with living in a culture with no means of refrigeration. After Henry had left us I fell to sleep almost instantly waking early in the morning to wash my face in a metal bowl of collected rainwater and find Jonathan and Henry already awake and talking outside.
‘Breakfast’ with Henry would prove to be the only disturbing experience of the entire trip. Making a mental list in my head of all the things that might be disturbing about visiting an isolated, non technology embracing religious community, I can honestly say that ‘breakfast’ didn’t feature very high. But as we entered Henrys hut again to find the food we had eaten the night before all still laid out, but covered in flies I quickly lost my appetite. Jonathan ate it, I didn’t. After another round of prayers, a little impromptu singing and a heart rending account of Henry’s wife’s last living moments we were saying our goodbyes to Henry and making our way down into the village. We were given instructions to call in on Deborah and Abram, we would know the house as they had a nursery out front and so off we went in the midday heat, once again not completely sure what we would find.