After the Loewen family had settled in on the farm, the oldest had to go find work elsewhere to help support the rest of the family. My father, Martin, worked on a farm six miles east of the Loewen home. The Colpitts, who owned that farm, were alone except for their two daughters who came home on weekends. One attended high school in Calgary and the other one was a teacher.

     Martin’s job was to milk eight cows morning and evening, and then work on the land during the day. In addition, he did garden work in the family garden – turning the sod, digging out gooseberries, treating the soil with manure and planting vegetables. He recalls that he didn’t have much free time except for Sundays – that was a sad time. After breakfast he cleaned up and dressed cleanly to attend Church.

     The people for whom he worked took him along to their church where he was warmly greeted by the pastor. He understood nothing, but the music was familiar. He was not yet a Christian and therefore, he didn’t care much for attending church. He had nothing to wear other than his Russian ‘costume’ with the high Russian boots, which drew stares from everyone. To them he was a DP (displaced person). On Sunday afternoons, if it should be a nice day, he would go out on the field and think of those wonderful days he spent among the youth of Pretoria. In his memoirs, Martin wrote:

Every Sunday afternoon we boys would get together and get into mischief. In the evenings, at 6:00 p.m., the boys and girls got together and sang folk songs, played games, and danced – was that ever an enjoyable time! We young people were in the large living room while the parents of the house sat in the small room and made sure nothing got out of hand.

     The memories of those golden days of youth and the “special” friendships that once were, would come flooding back to him in his homesickness for Russia, on that barren Alberta steppe on Sunday afternoons.

“I often fell down on the ground and cried bitterly. Then, after I had cried myself dry, I would stand up, walk on the prairie fields and commence to sing many of the songs I knew from my youth in Russia. I sang so loudly that the farmer, for whom I worked, even wondered what was wrong.”

     This loneliness was not only felt by Martin. The other members of the family – each in their own way, also felt this loneliness. In 1929-30, that loneliness was mitigated by the arrival in Alberta of the Eitzen cousins from the Soviet Union – three families consisting of 10 adults and two small children. They were Peter and Margaretha (Driedger) Sawatzky, brother Jacob, and Margaretha (Klaassen) Sawatzky, and the Peters siblings – Willi, Aganetha, Lena (Bartel), Henry and John (their parents had died in Russia). They had wanted to settle in Saskatchewan, but the government wasn’t allowing any immigrants due to the Depression. They were told that if they had relatives elsewhere, they were to go there instead, so Alberta is where they settled. Upon arriving at he Loewens, Abraham Loewen immediately dispatched the men to the foothills, about 32 miles west of the farm, where they became involved in winter logging.  It was Henry’s job to haul the logs, by horse and wagon, to a sawmill for cutting. The round-trip took two full days.

     The workload eventually took care of an immigrant’s loneliness.