Consider what these settlers carried with them, and what they did not. They had survived collectivization, the Soviet famine, and a war that had killed or scattered their men. Many arrived as widows leading children. Ahead lay a tropical wilderness where summer temperatures climb to 45°C and the year swings between bone-dry winters and torrential summer rains. The terrain offered no mountains to navigate by, just endless flat scrub rarely topping 300 meters. They had been refused by countries that could have made their lives easier, and they began again in one of the most demanding landscapes in the Americas. That they built anything here at all is the heart of Neuland's story.

The settlers prioritized schooling before they had proper buildings to hold it in. Classes met outdoors, in the shade of the Chaco's trees, because education was the one investment these families believed in completely. That conviction shaped the colony that grew. Today Neuland runs schools with modern laboratories and workshops, awards scholarships for university study in Asunción and abroad, and asks its graduates to bring their training home. Its Youth Symphony Orchestra, taught by visiting international musicians, performs classical works alongside the folk traditions of the cultures that meet in the Chaco. There is even the Joy Choir, formed on doctors' advice from the elderly, the ailing, and the newly arrived, who sing in the hospital wards to lift patients through hard days.

Neuland's district holds ground soaked in another war's history. Within it stands Fort Boquerón, where on September 29, 1932, the first decisive battle of the Chaco War ended after a brutal three-week siege. Bolivian and Paraguayan conscripts died there in the thousands, many not from bullets but from thirst, in a fight over the same arid land the Mennonites would later settle. A sculpture by the Paraguayan artist Hermann Guggiari now marks the site, and the colony's Museum of the History of Colonization sits nearby. The pioneers who came to plant peanuts and raise cattle made their homes on a place that had recently been one of South America's deadliest battlefields.

The Chaco the refugees called "New Land" was ancient ground to others. These thorn forests were the territory of indigenous peoples, the Enlhet and Ayoreo among them, who had lived by hunting and gathering here for generations before any European set foot in Boquerón. As the colony grew, indigenous families moved toward it for schooling, medical care, and work, and that proximity brought both opportunity and a deep imbalance, with the hardest and lowest-paid labor often falling to indigenous hands. To stand in Neuland today is to stand where two displaced peoples met: one driven from the far side of the world by war, the other pushed to the margins of a homeland it never left.