The Village of Neubergthal is looking forward to having you visit this coming Friday and Saturday for its annual Darp Days. Live entertainment, street tours, historical presentations and lots of Low German and Food. This is Mennonite Heritage Week in Canada, and Darp Days is one of the events in Southern Manitoba celebrating it.
"We're commemorating the 150 years of Mennonite settlement on the West Reserve, and also the 500th year of the world of anabaptism, and that is why we're bringing out Dr. Hans Werner, who's an expert in all of that," explained organizer Jolanda Friesen. "Overall, it's telling the stories and keeping Neubergthal and the pioneers alive."
The place to be Friday evening is the Commons Barn, with tickets sold at the door for the soup, Sloppy Joes and pie, as well as the entertainment. The evening will include The Penner Theatre Group, who are well known in the area, with Elvis tribute artist Corny Rempel taking the stage to wrap up the night.
Saturday is full of events, too, including Friesen leading the Village street tours.
"The village street tour is a trailer with some bales on it, and we'll simply start at the Commons Barn," she explained. "We'll drive all the way to the north end (oft he village), turn around and then go all the way to the south and back to the Commons Barn. I will be commentating on the history of Neubergthal when it was born, and actually I am attempting to do it in first person, so they will actually be meeting the Peter Klippenstein who put down roots right here in Neubergthal back in 1876, and try to make it interesting by trying to be different people as I remember them, or as I remember the second generation. Some of them will have to be the people I knew, and they inherited those yards from the pioneers."
Also on the agenda for Saturday are history presentations with Dr. Hans Werner, Plautdietsche Stories and Sayings with Al Schritt as well as something new this year called Tales from the Darpa.
"We are trying to involve the darpa," Friesen said. "It's just the villages all around Neubergthal, and most of these villages have their own (history) book, so we have asked different speakers, there's four in the morning and four different ones in the afternoon, which will be highlighting a story or two from the history book that has been published from their darp. W'll get to know all the darpa around us and not only Neubergthal."
You can listen to Chris Sumner's entire conversation with Jolanda Friesen below.