El Chaco, the vast flatland that covers the northern half of Paraguay and sprawls over into Bolivia, has a reputation as a harsh world of thorns and mud (in winter), or thorns and dust (in summer), where few men would dare or bother to try and scratch out a living. Once upon a time Bolivia and Paraguay, each backed by an international petroleum company, went to war over this region, when it was thought that (as yet undiscovered) oil might be lying beneath all that dirt and scrub.

The Trans-Chaco has a reputation as being a rough, tough stretch of highway that jolts and slithers from one nation to the other, but compared to most of the mountain highways in Bolivia, where every nighttime bump had me convinced we were about to topple over some immense precipice, this road feels tame and civilised. On the Paraguayan side of the border it is even asphalted. The endless, dead-straight strip, on which the vehicles appearing out of distant mirages took many many long minutes to finally pass the bus, was utterly unlike anything I had seen in the past six months. It was all so low, and straight, and flat.

This wild wilderness was where I bid my midnight goodbye to Bolivia, paid my expired-visa fine, and entered into Paraguay, a country I had prowled along the border of on my last South American trip, but had been unable to enter. This time I had the visa, and I was welcomed into the country by disinterested customs officials and straw-haired kids asking for food.  

The bus dropped me at a big, blank intersection, and I was told that to get to Filadelfia I should hitchhike, and that it wouldn’t be hard because the Mennos were good people. I’d wanted to stop in Filadelfia for exactly this reason; to find out something about the Mennonite communities that had washed up in waves in El Chaco, and that had somehow managed to thrive and prosper out there.

It was a friendly rancher that brought me to the edge of Filadelfia, and into the strange world that the Mennonites built. Filadelfia is the centre of the Fernheim Mennonite communities, which were settled by groups of Canadian, Russian and German Mennonites fleeing various persecutions of the 20s, 30s and 40s. It is also the first town I’ve seen in South America not to have a central, monument-filled plaza. The Mennonites wasted no time with such things; the first buildings erected here were a hospital, an industrial plant, the cooperative centre where goods are bought, sold and bartered, and the town hall, which had to serve for all governmental, social and religious purposes in the early days.

Today Filadelfia is a logical grid of dusty streets, its ‘main street’ being the strip of shops facing the plant and old town hall across a wide avenue. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed children tinkle along on bicycles, and giant pickups roar through the town. A few blocks from the ‘centre’ in any direction and the asphalt once again gives way to dust tracks and wild scrubland of cactus, bottle trees and thorns.

The success of the Mennonites here is a great credit to their work ethic; ‘Faith, Work and Unity’ is the maxim on the municipality sign, and the communities have thrived and brought prosperity to the Chaco through an uneasy mix of disparate cultures and values. The Mennonites are big land-owners out here, and they have cleared vast tracts of land to graze the cattle (this is illegal today but continues) that produce renowned Menno dairy products, but there are many miles of Chaco and not all that many Mennos, and much of the hard and menial work is done by members of the indigenous communities that have existed in some form or other for centuries in El Chaco. While Filadelfia represented a new and remote home for the Mennos to preserve their beliefs in, it is also a successful farm town, full of teenagers on dirt bikes and pin-ups advertising cheap beer to those whose beliefs do not forbid such things. Street vendors sell pirated DVDs, which apparently aren’t overtly prohibited in the Bible. I spent my first night in a rough hotel patronised by brown folk and my second in a neat, clean place patronised by white folk. The town is more or less divided along these lines; the wealthy, white people are greeted in German, and the poorer, brown people are greeted in Spanish or Guaranì. A polite formality exists and maintains the balance between the two groups, and as long as that harmony survives the community flourishes. This is probably the most multi-lingual country town anywhere in the world.

I didn’t do much with my time in Filadelfia; the town can be walked in an hour, its only museum can be seen in a few short minutes (a few more if you can read German), but it is none the less a fascinating place, with its strange ethnic mix, and its rigid formality. A trickle of tourists pass through, and these generate cautious curiosity. Cameras provoke suspicion. I did have the chance to meet a fellow couchsurfer who was doing time as a volunteer out here. As interesting as she was finding her work, there couldn’t be many tougher places to live as an expat; the rigid Mennonite codes and sensibilities imposed upon her because, as a white girl, it is with these that she belongs. And even apart from this there is the simple fact that there is almost nothing out here; the town is as dry as Mennonite aesthetics, or the vast emptiness of El Chaco.

My favourite sliver of Filadelfia life was that although the community has adopted the long, catatonic siesta, this siesta is still commenced and terminated every day by a loud bullhorn sounding from the industrial plant. Not a minute more relaxation can be tolerated, and as the horn sounds the sleepy streets become busy with motorbikes as people rush to and from work, cleaving to their defining work ethic and bringing a few frantic moments to this otherwise sleepy scrubland town.