Women Talking, the 2022 film based on a novel by Canadian writer Mariam Toews, depicts the sexual abuse of girls and women by male elders in a remote Mennonite colony.
It is a tough but beautiful film, tough because the colony’s women suffer horrendous abuse, and beautiful because they talk and argue and talk some more before agreeing to a plan to escape their captors.
Canadian filmmaker Sarah Polley won a best adapted screenplay Oscar for her sensitive treatment of the book, which is based on a true story.
But the truth and the whole truth are rarely the same thing, as the Mennonite Disaster Service’s work in Nova Scotia demonstrates. For if Women Talking offers one depiction of the Mennonite religion, the disaster service’s work in Cape Breton and eastern Nova Scotia tells us something else.
This week, in a CBC radio interview, a homeowner said Mennonite workers knocked on his door one day to ask if they could rebuild his roof. He said yes.
A lot of this has been going on since Hurricane Fiona cut a path of destruction through Nova Scotia last September, uprooting trees, ripping houses apart, and washing seafront cottages into the surf.
Mennonite disaster workers showed up soon after the storm. First, they went to work with chainsaws, clearing away debris. Then they took up their carpenters’ tools to repair homes.
Mennonite worker Kate Wagler of Milverton, Ontario, spent two weeks in the province cutting up fallen trees with a chainsaw. In one media photo, we see Kate standing on the rear bumper of a pickup truck. She’s wearing not the sort of traditional dress featured in Sarah Polley’s film, but old jeans and a hoodie.
It’s tempting to see the disaster service’s work as a public relations response to Women Talking. After all, a Mennonite woman working to help an outside community tells a different story than a circle of women talking about escaping their own.
Our long watch from the CrowsNest tells Kate is no mere PR prop, however. We know that religions, like people, are complex. And the same faith which shelters abusers can also send people like Kate into the world to help communities in the wake of a disaster.
The Mennonite Disaster Service, which employs a handful of people and can call on thousands of volunteers, was formed in 1950.
Given its long history and its recent work in Nova Scotia, we see the Service as an example of faith in action, in the very best way.