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Mennonite boys with cameras – ‘a tool of communication for the both of us’, says the author (Jake Michaels/Setanta Books)
After a “weary and tiring” journey in 1957, a community of Mennonite Christians arrived on the southern bank of the Belize River in the Caribbean country then called British Honduras. “Neither bridge nor ferry awaited them,” wrote the Mennonite Gerhard S Koop in 1991. “On the northern bank of the river was a dark and forbidding jungle with its strange noises and smells. Underneath the dense bush, giant snakes and jaguars made their home.”
The Mennonites had travelled to the country now called Belize from Mexico in the last leg of a generation-spanning, continent-crossing journey. The group, who believe in self-sufficiency and autonomy from the state, had originated in Germany and moved to Poland and Russia to escape the threat of integration or persecution from mainstream Christian institutions.