How Mennonite women are building bridges between public health and community amid measles outbreak

Winnipeg Free Press

2 days ago

LEAMINGTON, ONTARIO – Catalina Friesen got a call one night in February from one of her clients, a Low German-speaking mother in Aylmer, Ont. Her daughter had a rash that covered her body. The five-year-old had a fever and was coughing out of control.
'I said, 'just take her to emerge, especially if she's not eating or drinking,'' says Friesen, a personal support worker and liaison for a health clinic in St. Thomas, Ont., that caters to the Low German-speaking Mennonite community.
But her client said she already went to the hospital, and that they turned her away.
Friesen called the hospital and found out her client was told to go back to her car — standard practice for a measles patient while they prepare a negative-pressure room.
'But because they couldn't understand exactly what they were saying, they thought they told them to go home,' says Friesen, of the misunderstanding.
Friesen helps more than 700 Low German-speaking Mennonites navigate the health-care system in southwestern Ontario. She says she has guided at least 200 people through the current measles outbreak, translating test results and public health measures.
Every Thursday, she drives a bus outfitted as a walk-in-clinic to a church parking lot in Aylmer, Ont., that serves Low German-speaking Mennonites in the surrounding rural areas, where the community has been based for approximately 75 years.
Many of these families are from Mexico and have been migrating to the region for seasonal agricultural work since the 1950s, in some cases staying due to better economic opportunities.
Some drive from as far as Leamington, two hours away, for the clinic. Friesen says some don't have health cards as they apply and wait for permanent resident status, and she estimates about half of the people she sees are vaccinated.
Friesen says communication and language barriers paired with a historic distrust in authorities has set the stage for a unique set of challenges during the largest measles outbreak the province has seen in almost three decades, infecting more than 1,800 people. Many of them have been unvaccinated children in southwestern Ontario.
As a result, health providers have had to reckon with why some standard approaches to managing a highly contagious virus do not work for all patient populations, and in doing so, address their own assumptions to better shape communication for the community.
Friesen innately knows how to navigate some of these roadblocks because, she says, 'They're basically my people.'
She was born in a tiny Mexican town called Nuevo Ideal. She was around 10 years old when her family moved to Tillsonburg, southeast of London, Ont.
'When we moved here, it was extremely scary. I didn't know what anybody was talking about. We got made fun of a lot. Most of my childhood, most of my school life, I got made of as the Mennonite, Low German-speaking, whatever you want to call us,' she says, with a nervous laugh.
At the time she says she only spoke a little English and wore hand-me-down clothes to school. Students said she had an accent, her braids were weird, she smelled bad.
Friesen brings this past with her when she sits across from patients on the mobile clinic bus, or when she accompanies them to appointments, who tell her about similar experiences. She says she has seen doctors and nurses talk down to her patients.
'It's the stigmatism of – 'You're not from here. We don't like you,'' she says of the way her patients feel when they are treated this way.
Dr. Ninh Tran, the head of the Southwestern Public Health unit, gives regular virtual updates on the region's measles outbreak, and each week he holds a briefing, he is asked about unvaccinated Mennonites.
Every time, he warns the public of a false sense of safety that can come from blaming a single group for a widespread outbreak.
'Why name any specific groups when it's not entirely representative of that group anyways?' Tran said in a recent interview on a cold and wet day in late May.
Southwestern Public Health said it does not report on faith-based denomination in its measles immunization data.
In March, Ontario's Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Kieran Moore sent a memo to local medical officers of health linking the rise of measles cases in the province to an exposure at a large Mennonite gathering in New Brunswick last fall, which then spread to Ontario and Manitoba.
He wrote, 'Cases could spread in any unvaccinated community or population but are disproportionately affecting some Mennonite, Amish, and other Anabaptist communities due to a combination of under-immunization and exposure to measles in certain areas.'
In an April interview with The Canadian Press he reasserted that the 'vast majority' of Ontario's cases are among people in those communities.
When asked about Moore's memo in a subsequent media briefing, Tran again cautioned against singling out a group.
'It's always nice to finger point at someone, but it's not necessarily the reality … We're seeing cases everywhere and in different groups, and really the main thing is vaccination.'
Speaking as a vaccinated Mennonite, Amanda Sawatzky says anyone who believes all Mennonites are unvaccinated is wrong. Just like any other population, some are immunized and some are not.
'To be clear, many, many many, many, Mennonites are vaccinated. Let's not continue this narrative that this population group as a whole is not vaccinated,' says Sawatzky, who works in the social service sector and consults with health providers on best practices for working with Mennonites and newcomers in southwestern Ontario. She also has a Master of Social Work.
That's not the only misconception about Mennonites, she says.
'We come from all walks of life and practice in different ways. Some of us dress traditionally and some of us don't,' she says.
Sawatzky grew up in a Low German Mennonite village in Mexico's northwestern Chihuahua state where all of the houses were on one side of a dirt road and fields of fava beans and corn were harvested on the other. She didn't have indoor plumbing or hydro until she was seven.
But now, she lives in a suburban house on a cul-de-sac in Leamington with a car parked in the driveway and a pool in the backyard. She sports a baby blue blazer and beige heels. She still identifies as a Mennonite.
There are approximately 60,000 Low German-speaking Mennonites living in southwestern Ontario, according to a 2024 guide by the Low German Speaking Mennonite Community of Practice in Elgin, St. Thomas, Oxford, and Norfolk.
Michelle Brenneman, executive director of Mennonite Central Committee Ontario, says that's likely a low estimate.
She also notes there are more than 30 different groups that identify as Mennonite in Ontario and hold a variety of views on how to practice their faith, dress and live.
Sitting beside her, Linda Ruby, a Low German liaison adds, 'There's this assumption that Mennonites that are being talked about in the media are these horse-and-buggy-driving Mennonites. But Low German-speaking Mennonites do not drive a horse and a buggy at all, ever. They drive cars,' says Ruby.
Sawatzky says historical context dating back hundreds of years is relevant to understand the current outbreak. She says governments asked members of the Low German-speaking Mennonite community to work the land in exchange for absolute autonomy to run schools and preserve their faith, language, and culture.
But she says governments went back on their word in Europe, and then in Western Canada. Low German-speaking Mennonites left to Mexico and South American countries in the 1920s, but returned to Canada for better economic opportunities in the 1950s.
'Knowing what I've explained about the migration and the government taking back what they had promised, there is a lot of mistrust with the government as a whole,' she says, noting that extends to public health.
'So now, when you take any public health crisis – COVID, measles now, I'm not sure what the next thing is going to be, but there will be a next thing – there is mistrust when the government says, thou shall do A-B-C, because of what has happened in the past.'
Sawatzky says she was recently at a community gathering and overheard a parent chatting about how they had pushed back when contact tracers called, refusing to answer their questions. Sawatzky approached the person and explained the purpose of the call was to keep the community safe.
'We were able to have a good conversation, even though they were completely different points of view … And at the end, they were like, 'Oh, okay, they're supposed to call me back again. Maybe I'll give them a little bit more.''
Not long before that conversation, a local health provider reached out to Sawatzky to try to understand why some Mennonites refused or resisted to provide their whereabouts for infection control.
She asked how they worded their messaging and identified the word 'investigation' could be the problem.
'That sounds really punitive when we say that word to individuals who maybe have a very limited understanding of what public health's role is … because they have tried not to engage with any system that's government-funded.'
She suggested softening the language to explain that health providers are trying to understand where people have been to determine who is at risk of getting sick.
For Brenneman, executive director of Mennonite Central Committee Ontario, the public is looking at this outbreak as a cause and effect moment – the outbreak started at a Mennonite gathering and it is therefore spreading within that community.
But the longer the outbreak lasts, she says the public narrative will have to expand to hold more nuance and become more accurate.
'It spreads because people are not vaccinated. And if it's going to spread further … it's not going to be because of the Mennonites. It is going to be because there are other groups of unvaccinated people in the population and it will spread the way science tells us these things spread.'
This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 5, 2025.
Canadian Press health coverage receives support through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content.