After a while, Sara just accepted those nights as a horrific fact of life. No one knew what to do, and so no one did anything at all. "But we didn't know who was doing it, so how could we stop it?" "We only knew that something strange was happening in the night," Abraham Wall Enns, Manitoba Colony's civic leader at the time, said. Some called it "wild female imagination." Others said it was a plague from God. Some women remembered brief moments of terror: For an instant they would wake to a man or men on top of them but couldn't summon the strength to yell or fight back. Throughout the community, people were waking to the same telltale morning signs: ripped pajamas, blood and semen on the bed, head-thumping stupor. "We thought she was making it up to hide an affair." The family's pleas for help to the council of church ministers, the group of men who govern the 2,500-member colony, were fruitless-even as the tales multiplied. When rumors spread, "no one believed her," said Peter Fehr, Sara's neighbor at the time of the incidents. In the beginning, the family had no idea that they weren't the only ones being attacked, and so they kept it to themselves. Mennonite children attend school in Manitoba Colony, Bolivia. (Manitobans aren't connected to the power grid, so at night the community is submerged in total darkness.) "It happened so many times, I lost count," Sara said in her native Low German, the only language she speaks, like most women in the community. But inevitably, when their one-story home-set back and isolated from the dirt road-was not being watched, the rapes continued. On a few occasions, a loyal Bolivian worker from the neighboring city of Santa Cruz would stay the night to stand guard. The family tried locking the door some nights, Sara did everything she could to keep herself awake. ![]() Five years ago, her daughters also began waking up with dirty sheets and complaints of pain "down below." The evil had penetrated the household, Sara said. Her two daughters, 17 and 18 years old, squatted silently along a wall behind her and shot me fierce blue-eyed stares. A slight breeze of soy and sorghum came off the nearby fields as Sara told me how, in addition to the eerie rope, on those mornings after she'd been raped she would also wake to stained sheets, thunderous headaches, and paralyzing lethargy. ![]() Mennonites are similar to the Amish in their rejection of modernity and technology, and Manitoba Colony, like all ultraconservative Mennonite communities, is a collective attempt to retreat as far as possible from the nonbelieving world. Earlier this year, I visited Sara at her home, simple concrete painted to look like brick, in Manitoba Colony, Bolivia. She would sometimes wake up in her bed with small pieces of it tied tightly to her wrists or ankles, the skin beneath an aching blue. For Sara Guenter, the mystery was the rope.
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