ountry C Friday, November 20, 2020
cres A Focusing on Today’s Rural Environment
Volume 8, Edition 16 PHOTO SUBMITTED
The Arends family is happy to be together on their Back 40 farm south of Willmar. Pictured are (from left) Dana, Alexandra (Sascha), Mitchell (Misha), Al, Charlotte (Charlie) being held by Helen, William, Natalie, Jonathan and Samantha.
Life on the
Back 40
Arends met in Russia, honor Eastern European ethnicities
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BY DIANE LEUKAM | STAFF WRITER
I L L M A R – When Al and Helen Arends gather their children around the table, it’s a big family, it’s a big table, and it’s a big deal. For them, food is an important way to connect with people and in their home, family meals are sacred. The Arends live on the Back 40, their farm south of Willmar. They own 250 acres, half of which they rent out and on the other half they grow alfalfa organically. They raise 50 head of grass-fed beef, along with broiler chickens. Wandering through the yard is the family dog, a number of cats and six peacocks. The farmhouse features a
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kitchen that is a center of activity and next to it, a dining area with a large wooden table handcrafted by Al and some of the kids. The Arends children include daughter Dana, 23, who has recently moved to North Carolina; Alexandra (Sascha), is 21, and this month begins a career in law enforcement in Rogers; Jonathan is 19, Natalie, 16, Samantha, 12, Mitchell (Misha) is 11, William, 7 and little Charlotte (Charlie) is 4. On Nov. 4, the smell of scones baking in the oven filled the room as the Arends spoke of life, love, faith and family. Al grew up in Willmar, and even though the family now lives in what was Al’s grandparents’
This month in the
home, the story of their life together began nearly 5,000 miles away in Moscow, where Helen grew up. The two met in 1991, not long after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. Al was there on a Christian mission trip and was with a group for whom Helen was a translator. Through that experience and one subsequent mission trip, they became friends, wrote many letters and eventually married in the United States in 1995. Sitting with a cup of coffee and those freshly baked scones, Helen shared the seismic event in her life that changed everything. She had not yet met Al, but was sitting in her high school class when it was requested she come to a neighboring school to translate. There were Americans coming who didn’t speak Russian, and she was most fluent in
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English. She wasn’t excited to go to the school but did it anyway. All her life, she had been taught that Americans were evil imperialists across the ocean. She had never seen a real American, and they were not what she expected. “I went to the school and there were these people who were just beautiful,” she said with her soft Russian accent, her voice choking up and tears beginning to flow. “There were these kids who were all older teenagers and young adults, and they were just really amazing people who had so much love, and they were there to meet Russian kids and tell them about Jesus. That changed my life.” Now, sitting in their kitchen together in Willmar, the love of this family is blatantly obvious. It is grounded in a faith that had been completely unheard of for
Food is center stage Diane Leukam column
Helen, having lived in an atheist country where even a hint of religion was cause for persecution. She described growing up there in the 1980s and early ‘90s of living in a state of grayness brought on by the socialist/communist regime she lived under, as well as the constant fear experienced by her family. She remembers one event in particular, when she was in about third or fourth grade. She and her mother were walking in Moscow, and they came across a beautiful church. “I looked at it and said, ‘This is so beautiful, I just want to go inside.’ She said, ‘No, you can’t go inside because if someone sees you there, you will get kicked out of your school and your dad will lose his job,’” Helen said.
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