Mexican Mennonites and schools in Brooks Alberta

Marie Gervais, PhD, Director, Global Leadership Associates Inc. www.global-leadership.ca

Fall landscape Alberta

I had a very interesting week in Brooks, Southern Alberta, training teachers on intercultural competency and English language learning for newcomers. Many of the problems teachers face in Brooks are similar to teachers in other areas in the province; a steady stream of newcomer students requiring help with English as an additional language, parents’ and teachers’ unrealistic expectations about achievement levels before academic language in each subject reaches proficiency (it takes between 5-7 years for academic English to parallel conversational English for newcomer students), problems of family adjustment and culture shock. Just when teachers get used to working with newcomers from one country, say Sudan, a wave of newcomers from Columbia and Vietnam bring new baffling behaviors to consider and teachers are not sure what to do.

We had an excellent time together, and these dedicated educators, administrators and support staff were quite adept at finding and identifying cultural cues and practicing strategies to support literacy and English language proficiency learning in a variety of subject matters. But what I learned in the process was just as significant. It was an introduction to the phenomenon of Mexican Mennonites in Southern Alberta. Apparently some 100 years ago Mennonites fleeing persecution in Germany and Eastern European countries came to settle here and also in Mexico. Canadian Mennonites went to Mexico as well. For many years there has been an ongoing Mennonite migration and back and forth travel between Mexico and Southern Alberta with Mennonites of orthodox communities leaving Canada for Mexico for months at a time, with or without their children. Children are registered in so-called home schooling programs so that they can be taken out of school after grade 5 without reprisal. The home schooling does not actually exist so these children miss out entirely on their education. The children work on farms, or they wait for their parents to come back from extended visits to Mexico with very little to do. Social problems are more and more common, but they are kept quiet within the cloistered Mennonite colonies.

Imagine teaching a class where your Mennonite students are absent for three to six months of the year, your Chinese students are sent home every second year to stay with relatives and keep up their Chinese and your East Indian students go for three months of holidays to visit their relatives. As African families become re-united you receive children from the same family, but  all kinds of interrupted schooling, no school experience and/or war torn traumas to overcome; even speaking languages at home that other family members cannot understand because they have all been separated in different countries or refugee camps. At any given moment you can be missing a third to half of your students, and new students come all the time with all these extremes of experience and more. Somehow you have to get them all ready to write diploma exams upon which your school is ranked against other schools in the province with schools who have more stable student populations or who may be speaking English as their first language.

Then to top it all off, your Mennonite students whose parents are off in Mexico decide to come to school anyway because they are bored and miss their friends, but they refuse to learn because “technically” they aren’t registered! Oh and did I say that a number of these same Mennonite travellers are part of drug rings that bring so many illegal drugs into the area that the Medicine Hat police have to spend over half their time and resources in Brooks dealing with the repercussions? I conduct workshops for schools all around the province and there is very little I haven’t hear of or seen. But the Mexican Mennonite situation sounded so fantastic I had some trouble believing it.

When I returned home I went straight to google and discovered literally hundreds of documented and researched pieces about the Brooks area, Manitoba and Ontario Mexican Mennonites. I decided to do a proper research piece and post it once I have digested everything.  But I had to write a about it now while it is all still so fresh in my mind. When I think about how hard it was for the first pioneers to get schools up and running and to have all children registered in school, it seems incredible to me that the Alberta Ministry of Education and the School Boards in this day and age would allow this kind of educational evasion. I’m also incredulous that there has not been a more dedicated effort to pin down and clean up the drug traffic problems connected to this transmigration phenomenon. Several of the documents I found online were from Mennonite newsletters deploring the drug issues in the community.

One of the skills I teach in the intercultural competency workshops is how to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy cultural behaviors. In this case there are unhealthy behaviors on many sides; those perpetrating the problems, those tolerating them and those who in a position of authority, chose to ignore the consequences of doing nothing to solve them.