Walking through the peaceful, pastoral hills and down a well-worn sandy path between neatly plowed fields on a sunny Friday afternoon on the Rosenfeld Hutterite colony, Stacy and her new friend Marissa have fallen behind the other young women to privately discuss Marissa’s revelation.

“You’re planning to leave here soon?” Stacy asked in a hushed tone. “Where are you thinking of going?”

“I don’t know yet,” Marissa whispered back. “I just know that I don’t want to spend my life here.”

“Does your family know about your plans?”

“Actually, my mother has been encouraging all of us to leave here,” Marissa confided. “She says that she would have liked to leave herself. But then she met my father, and got married when she was eighteen and started having babies. My father died ten years ago, and my mother had no idea how to earn a living on the outside with five children. Tessa was only two at the time. So, we just stayed here. But she has been encouraging us to leave once we finish school. She says that we need to have grade 12 finished so that we will be able to get jobs.”

“So that’s why you are taking your grade 12 by correspondence?”

“Yes. The school here only goes to grade 9. After that, we have to go to the public school in town. I went there for grade 10, but I couldn’t take all the teasing about my clothes, and my hair covering, and the way I talked. So I finished grade 10 there, and I have been trying to finish high school on my own ever since. It isn’t easy because I also have to work in the kitchen, take care of children, and we also have a sewing room where we work together to make the mattresses and cushions for the futons that the men make and sell. School work is not really valued here,” Marissa explained. “If you go to almost any of the parents and ask why little Johnny isn’t doing his homework, you are almost certain to hear, ‘Johnny will be a Hutterite all his life. He doesn’t need all that fancy English schooling.’”

“Thanks for the warning,” Stacy said, trying to stifle a giggle over Marissa’s impersonation of an older Hutterite man. “Jenny Reynolds did warn me about that, so I have not been expecting too much in the way of homework.”

The group of young women had completed the loop around the alfalfa field, and was back to where they started outside the kitchen. “We have to get to work in the kitchen now, so we will have to leave you here,” Marissa told Stacy. “I hope you can join our walk again after school on Monday.”

“I would like that,” Stacy replied. “It was good to meet all of you.”

The giggling girls said good bye as Stacy got into her little blue Chevy Cavalier and drove slowly past the children playing near the driveway. She waved to them and settled in for the short drive to the small town of Cornish where she had found a small basement suite for rent.

“This was going to be an interesting three months,” Stacy thought. She had no idea how interesting.