Hutterites

Hutterites

According to Wikipedia “are an ethnoreligious group that is a communal branch of  Anabaptists who, like the Amish and Mennonites, trace their roots to the Radical Reformation of the early 16th century.”

I had never heard of Hutterites until I did a job for them a few years ago. They had bought a used three station rotary thermoformer form a company in Syracuse NY. They had me go to Syracuse to take it apart and load it on a flat bed truck. They had paid me $1500 plus travel expenses to disassemble the machine and load it. I told them I would charge them another $1500, plus expenses, to go up to Alberta Canada about thirty miles east of Calgary where their colony was to reassemble it. They said that they would be able to reassemble the machine without any help from me. I said OK but once you touch the machine the $1500 is void.   I can’t be responsible for whatever any other party does to the machine.

Sure enough, two months later they called me and asked me how fast I could get up there. I ended up driving my little motor home up through the Canadian Rockies in the dead of winter with Sadie my faithful  Golden Retriever. We spent about ten days at their colony putting in a new PLC, Programmable Logic Controller, and making other necessary fixes. The Colony was, as I find myself saying often, like being on another planet.

Hutterites unlike their Amish and Mennonite brethren do not own anything but the clothes on their backs. They live in communal apartments, one to a family, and eat in a communal dining hall. All of the men eat first. They are served by the women who also clean up the tables for them. Next the women eat all together and are served by the children who clean up after them and lastly all of the children eat together.

Everyone at the colony dress like the Amish. The men with the all black outfits and beards without mustaches. The boys dress the same as the men except without the beards. The women wear somewhat colorful dresses but like Amish women their dresses are old fashioned with long skirts and they also wear those little bonnets. I lived and slept in my motorhome but dined in one of the apartments with my host family. The apartments didn’t have a kitchen, per se, but they had a sink for cleaning up. Needless to say, they are very neat and clean folks.

While I was there, I was a novelty. It was like the circus had come to town. Id be working and have a feeling that I was being watched. The reason I felt like I was feeling like I was being watched was I was being watched. I’d turn around and there would be a gallery of women and children watching me work. I would be walking my dog and I’d have a gang of kids watching my every move. There wasn’t a single dog in the colony.

The colonies are very profitable due to low overhead and no direct labor costs but all seem to have an auxiliary business endeavor to  help boost up the bottom line. My, our, colony was plastics. There was no televisions in the colony. I had my TV on one evening and the only thing I could receive was a hockey game. I was, after all, in Canada. Once again, I had that feeling that I was being watched and when I looked out the window, I saw a half dozen bearded Hutterite men also watching the game.

There is one telephone in the colony’s office along with the one computer. They do have a few pickup trucks for getting supplies and the few staples that they don’t grow themselves. The young, single men also use the trucks to visit a neighboring colony to go a courtin’.

When a colony gets to too big they go to the local bank and withdraw about twenty million dollars out of their account and buy some more land maybe forty miles away for a new colony. Some of the men  and boys go TAD and   go to the new land and build all of the barns, apartments and other communal buildings. When they are finished, they come back and two lists are made up. An A list and a B list. The night before the big move a slip of paper id drawn out of a hat to see who stays and who goes. If you are on the A list and A was drawn, you’re moving and the B people will stay. Just like that with eight hours notice you learn your fate.

BTW, they speak German on the colonies. I too speak German but what they speak is archaic German. I not only speak modern German, I speak Swabish a dialect. We had some difficulty conversing in German but we could eventually figure it out. Also like all good Germans, they loved their beer. I brought a case of Coors with me which didn’t stand a snowballs chance in hell there. They loved it and it went fast.

Apart from the weird clothes and lack of all of the spiffy things that all of us modern folks consider essential, they are very happy people. They have a provincial teacher come in once a week to teach English and Canadian history which is mostly ignored but they don’t worry about The Bomb or their 401K or what is being worn in Paris. They just plod along feeding their animals and plowing their fields and making the plastic parts that they build.

All in all, it’s not a bad way to live.