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WhatsApp With the Mennonites?

How does a group of Mennonites skip altogether an entire era of a rotary dial communication and go straight to using smartphone technology?


After my great grandfather Reverend Johan P. Wall moved a large portion of his congregation in the early 1920s from Saskatchewan, Canada to the remote desert lands of Durango, Mexico, staying connected with family left behind was next to impossible. Phones were not allowed in the conservative Mennonite community.

As the years passed and the rest of the world evolved, more and more of us became illiterate. Living in a Spanish-speaking country, speaking Plautdiesch at home, also known as Low German and reading and speaking only High German at school and church, writing letters as a means to stay connected became more and more challenging, to say the least.

As more of us returned to Canada, the four languages have become a consistent passenger during our complex journey. Only the necessary basic parts of these languages make it onto our only verbal vocabulary list, just to get us by during our common journey back and forth between Canada and Mexico. Though Plautdiesch is the dominant language spoken we wouldn’t necessarily know all information in the Plautdietsch language because we literally experience particular parts of our lives divided by languages. More often than not we seek medical treatments from either Spanish or English-speaking people, therefore, we do not necessarily know the context of that communication in our everyday language. We know one or both of the other languages better in terms of that specific context.

When leaving the gates of our tightly knit Mennonite community, and we´re often asked, ¨What’s your nationality?¨ in a language, we may or may not understand well, the answer becomes messy very quickly, ¨I’m Mexican, holding a Canadian citizen, I don’t really speak Spanish or English, I speak Plautdietsch which is a non-written language, and the High German written language I was supposed to learn I didn’t really learn. “You can take back this pen and paper because it’s useless to me!¨ This is a brief glimpse of how the story unfolds more often than not. All we can do in moments like that is hope and pray the person next in line is generous enough to help us out.

Skip ahead a couple of years shy of a century, a large number of us have strayed and integrated somewhat into modern society, though still lacking much knowledge of worldly matters, the majority of us own a smartphone and most of us have downloaded an app called WhatsApp. The app has the ability to meet most, if not all our complex communication needs in whatever form or language our hearts desire. Not to mention, we can use the app to communicate without needing to change plans or phones. It doesn’t affect what country you are communicating from as the use of regular phone features would.


WhatsApp is a text and voice messaging app that launched in 2009. It’s become increasingly popular in our community since then, thanks to its voice messaging features. The app has made my job as a Low German community health worker and interpreter much easier and faster to do. The app has made it not only possible for me to stay connected to my loved ones back in my colony but, I have also been able to reach the community far and wide with important updates regarding public health and safety during an ever-changing worldwide pandemic. The status-sharing feature of the app allows everyone on my contact list to have access to what I have shared and then share it with their contacts and so on. It has made it possible for me to do my job safely, and more effectively. It has made it possible to continue to run community health groups in collaboration with service providers that without the app would be much more difficult to achieve especially during a pandemic.

Here is one example of how I have used the app to do my job remotely. I record voice messages in English, and then in Plautdietsch, which then can be played to the service provider communicating with the Plautdietsch speaking client and vice versa, making my physical presence not necessary, in not all but a few cases. When the client is done with the appointment and has received written instructions, he or she will then take a picture of it to send it to me. I read it and record, verbally, the instruction in their language and send it back to the client.

One might ask if modern technology is the solution to all forms of communication even in a Mennonite community, why not take me, the human interpreter out of the equation altogether, and just use Google Translate? That would be possible, if it were any other language. Google Translate doesn’t speak Plautdiesch because it’s not an official written language. Even if it were, the unique way that we have adopted and become accustomed to the use of multiple languages has basically made my job as an interpreter that much more important. Because It’s not just a language that we use to communicate with each other it has become somewhat of a cultural code language unique only to this particular group.

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