After weeks of living in jungle tents, the handful of Mennonite families trying to make a new home deep in the Peruvian Amazon began to despair. Wasps attacked as they tried to clear forest. Heavy rains turned the road to their camp to mud.

Running low on supplies, some wanted to turn back. Instead, they worked harder and eventually carved out an enclave.

“There’s a place here where I wanted to live so we came and opened part of it up,” recalled Wilhelm Thiessen, a Mennonite farmer. “That’s what everyone did to have a place to live.”

Today, seven years later, the cluster of homesteads is now a thriving colony, Wanderland, home to roughly 150 families, a church — which doubles as a school — and a cheese-processing facility.

It is one of a string of Mennonite settlements that have taken root throughout the Amazon, turning forest into thriving farms but also raising concerns among environmentalists about deforestation of a jungle already under threat from industries like cattle ranching and illegal gold mining.

Mennonite communities have come under official scrutiny, as well, including in Peru, where the authorities are investigating several, accusing them of clearing forest without required permits. The colonies deny wrongdoing.