Inside the Canadian commune that's stuck in the 1800s

Camilla Macpherson wins £200 for her account of a visit to a reclusive religious community in Canada

There is no sign on the main highway to the Hutterite colony at Pincher Creek in southern Alberta, Canada. You won’t notice it if you are driving by, like most people, on the way to somewhere else. You need to be told exactly how to get there. Hutterites like to keep to themselves.

If you get lost, all you can do is call up and hope that someone is near the phone. There is no website or email address and the colony is not marked on GPS. Hutterites don’t hold with technology.

If you want to visit, you call up and ask politely. If you are lucky, they will invite you to lunch and show you around. They eat together, sitting at long tables, three times a day 365 times a year. Men sit on one side of the room and women on the other.

They eat whatever is put in front of them, no complaints. Then they get back to work, farming their 10,000 acres. At the age of 15, a girl will be given an apron for the slaughterhouse. A boy gets a set of keys to the tractor. 

The Hutterites speak accented English to visitors. Otherwise, they use a form of German, because this is where they came from, long ago, making their way from there and Austria to Moravia and Transylvania, then on into Ukraine.

They reached North America in the late 1800s, bringing their form of Christianity with them, and they still dress exactly as they did then – shirts and black trousers for the men, long, patterned dresses and headscarves for the women. The clothing is handmade, but they get their coats from Walmart now. It’s cheaper that way.

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When they speak, the words come slow and steady. There is no rush to finish a conversation. There are no televisions to watch, no screens to swipe, or statuses to update. Make no mistake, they know what’s going on. They are not confined to the colony by any means. But they still talk a lot about Princess Diana when the rest of the world has moved on.

An hour after leaving, I am eating a sugar-laden doughnut in a roadside chain. A woman at the next table is flipping through a self-help book. One of her children is glued to an iPhone. The other is demanding lollies. A television blares out a loop of adverts. It makes you think.

It’s not an easy life, being a Hutterite. You need to have faith and obey the rules. But in return you are given everything you need. They can leave if they want to, but they mostly don’t.

People on the outside say that’s because they can’t cope in the real world (could you cope in theirs?). I think it’s simpler than that. They’re happy there, and they know it.

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