Ask Gundolf Niebuhr when you visit the Jacob Unger Museum in Filadelfia, Paraguay.

Want to see specimens of 210 species of mammals in the Chaco? Or 250 species of birds? Art objects from the many indigenous tribes? Artifacts from the pioneer days of the Mennonite colonies? How about bones of a Mastodon? Or a coin from the 15th century, probably dropped by conquistadores on their way to the Inca Empire in search of gold?

When you come to the Chaco, before or after the Mennonite World Conference, your first stop will most assuredly be the Jacob Unger Museum in Filadelfia.
Varied experiences: Elizabeth and Gundolf Niebuhr. Photo by Katherine Arnoldi.

There to guide you on your discoveries will be Gundolf Niebuhr, curator of the museum and director of the Archives of Fernheim Colony, who will soon impart to you his love of the Chaco, its people, history, cultures, flora and fauna.

His own story is as interesting as the museum and as varied, with one culture shock after another.

Gundolf’s grandfather worked in the very building that now houses the museum back when it was the Administrative Center of Filadelfia. His mother was 9 years old when her family came to the Mennonite colonies in the Chaco in 1930 from refugee camps in Germany. His father came two years later, part of the Harbiner group that had fled toward China from the Ukraine and central Siberia, crossing the Amur River, then passing though France.

“When I was young, we used to go to the Indian Village on Sunday to the soccer games, and as a family we spoke with many of the indigenous, who spoke Plautdeutch. I saw many attractions in their way of life and looking at the world.”

When Gundolf was 12, the family moved from small town, subarid, tropical Filadelfia, where he was born in 1957, to urban life in temperate Vancouver, B.C. After high school, he returned to Filadelfia with his family and worked as an electrician for four years. During this time he was baptized at the General Conference Mennonite Church and felt called to the ministry, so he studied at the Mennonite Bible Seminary in San Lorenzo, close to Asunción.

There he met and soon married Elizabeth Funk, who was in the church music program and whose family had been refugees from the Ukraine during World War II, helped by Peter Dyck to make their way to Paraguay, where they settled in Volandam. She graduated in 1980 but stayed on studying piano and working at the seminary’s library while they lived in a small apartment.

“We have fond recollections of this time in our lives,” Gundolf says. “The entire operations at the seminary were small then, and even San Lorenzo was much smaller, more tranquil.”

But their happiest times were yet to come in a place where they would experience their greatest culture shock. In 1984, Gundolf graduated, and they set off for Yalve Sanga, the settlement of Nivaclé and Enlhet indigenous tribes just south of Filadelfia, where Gundolf taught at the Bible school and Elizabeth led a music program.

“It was a fruitful experience to be asked questions about myself from a completely different cultural perspective,” Gundolf says. “As long as you move in your own context, you are never really aware of your own conditioning.”

Ready for yet another culture shock, Gundolf, now an ordained minister, and Elizabeth wanted to keep growing and learning. In 1986, they and their new daughter moved to Elkhart, Ind., where he attended Mennonite Biblical Seminary while Elizabeth studied the organ.

“Although I had studied the piano for many years, studying the organ with Orlando Schmidt was exciting because it was a different method.” She often stole away to the chapel at midnight in order to find time to practice. The couple spent their summers on pastoral internships in Newton, Kan.

“I noticed quickly that seminary studies were demanding,” Gundolf says. “The time at the seminary was intense.” The cross-cultural experience at Yalve Sanga motivated him to study anthropology at Notre Dame for one summer, too.

Next it was back to Yalve Sanga, where, from 1989 until 1995, Gundolf again taught school, this time at the new Teacher’s College, which he began along with Carlos Giesbrecht. Today, because of this school, nearly all the elementary school teachers in the native settlements are indigenous, as are many of the secondary school teachers.

“Due to the new constitution in 1992, there was a new openness at the time for new models of teaching,” Gundolf says, and they invited elders in the community to come to the classroom and share their stories and theories on the education of young people. “It was a time when the entire community participated in education.”

Discussions took place around fires on weekend camping trips, where students felt free to question, explore and debate pedagogies they were studying in the classroom. He began with Carlos Giesbrecht an NGO called Communidad de Indigenous, which Giesbrecht still facilitates.

In 1995, Gundolf experienced yet another culture shock as he moved back to the town of his birth and childhood, and began working at the archives and then the museum. Now he is busy with plans to expand the museum to a now-vacant school building close by.

“I would like to see the ethnological section enlarged and for the natural history section to include botany and more animals from the Chaco,” Gundolf says.

Another project is the excavation of a precolonial indigenous site on the estancia of Fritz Hoeck, who has carefully protected the site.

“This would entail an archeology department at a major university undertaking the project,” Gundolf says. He now greets 2,000-3,000 visitors a year at the museum from as far away as New Zealand and Australia, although most visitors are from Brazil, Argentina, North America and Europe.

Soon, thanks to Mennonite World Conference, the museum is about to host visitors from the four corners of the earth. And, by the way, when you are at the Jakob Unger Museum, be sure to look at the heavy wool coat with its fur collar and fur hat the unsuspecting Mennonite refugees brought with them to this, the Torrid Weather Zone, in the Chaco.

Katherine Arnoldi, the author of two books, is a member of Manhattan (N.Y.) Mennonite Fellowship and currently a Fulbright Fellow in Paraguay.