We Couldn't Stop

Protesting outside the Manitoba legislature: 'You could work there all day and you didn't feel tired.'

Part 1: Hutterite Hospitality

Screen capture from 70-minute Eagle Vision interview. Full interview is available with purchase of the documentary film, Unacceptable? (click image)

After feeding Manitoba truckers at a border crossing, and driving to another province to feed the Freedom Convoy, Ben’s team kept going. The provincial legislature, in the heart of Winnipeg, is roughly 90 minutes northwest of the Hutterite Colony in which he resides. When truckers and others gathered outside that legislature in a protest parallel to the one in Ottawa, Ben’s team set up across the street. He explains:

Jim, my friend, he stayed there a lot in his truck. We had a food trailer there where we kept our supplies. And then we had two different kitchen trailers set up, just U-Hauls. One with supplies and barbecues. And one with a table inside, nice and warm, where you could make sandwiches.

So we grilled outside, and we took the burgers in - the patties - and the women put the meat in the bun, and cheese. And then we had…our kettle for soup.

The trailers were locked at night, and Jim kept an eye on things. A schedule was drawn up, with different Hutterites volunteering on different days. “We were out there at the Ledge [Legislature], but there was nobody listening,” Ben remembers. The people who were outdoors in the cold, “were listening to us, and were hearing our message” so they became “our primary focus.”

During an Eagle Vision interview, recorded in March 2022, he says

I have never hugged so many people than I have in the last two months. Everybody's arms are open. Everybody's searching for something. Like a big sponge. Everybody's dried up. For two years.

People are put on this Earth to multiply, and to love and to care for each other. And to show good deeds to one another. And when you separate them or isolate them…people start getting depressed.

Ben’s team sometimes worked 12-hour days. One of the most rewarding things, he says,

was seeing the homeless. And feeding them, talking to them, hearing their stories. The hurt, the sick, the lame, the poor, the dying, the hopeless. These are the kinds of people that were there every day.

And of course there was other folks from Winnipeg, that came and supported every day. Average day, we had about three, 400 people. On the weekends, there was about 2,000.

Getting a bit emotional, he says “You could work there all day, from 10 till almost 10 at night…and you didn't feel tired. There was an invisible driver there. Like you had to do it. You just couldn't stop. I know sometimes we would pack up. OK, nobody's coming, it's over. The crowd is thinning out. And boom, 70 people would show up. We'd fire it up again.”

Numerous conversations about spiritual matters took place during those weeks. Trucker Jim befriended a lost soul who was behaving erratically at one in the morning:

Jim started ministering to her. And he told her about Jesus, and his love, and his forgiveness…And he spent an hour with her there, that night. And she came back…She was much more alert the next day. And he ministered to her, and she accepted Jesus in her life.

During that time, contact was also re-established with former Hutterites. “We really started interacting with these people that had left the communities, I don’t know, some five, some 10, some 20 years ago,” Ben says. “They came out. We really embraced them. And they supported us, and we supported them.”

Then there were the immigrants:

When we were in the city, that's also one of the things that happened. A lot of immigrants left Poland and third world countries...to get away from what they're actually experiencing right now…Elderly people came [up to us and asked] ‘How can we help you? This is what we moved away from, this kind of tyranny, this kind of government. This is what we experienced.’

…This one guy came, he was so supportive. He owns a business now, a little repair business. And he says, ‘For weeks and weeks and weeks, I hadn't been able to sleep. And when I see you people here…and these truckers, I have hope. I've been able to sleep.’

Families have been torn asunder by COVID policies, Ben says. “There isn’t an outside [non-Hutterite] person that I know where there isn’t a division in the family…In weddings. In funerals. You can’t come if you’re not vaxxed.” In every church, everywhere, he says, there’s now conflict.

Fleeing persecution, Ben’s forefathers immigrated to countries where they could live their faith and “not have to worry about the people that are supposed to protect you - which is the government.” In his view, people are too trusting of the authorities. “That’s not where the trust is supposed to be. You’re supposed to do your own research, use your own common sense.”

Canada was built, he says, by people who talked to each other. “We all make mistakes - and so does government. How do we resolve things? We sit around the kitchen table, we talk it over.” But when the truckers went to Ottawa, he says, “There was no communication.”

During the earliest weeks of 2022, Ben’s team filled bellies, soothed wounds, and saved souls. “We didn't set out to do this,” he says. “We simply set out to feed truckers, and to basically give them a nutritious meal. And it turned into a ministry.”