Hundreds of Amish Turn Out for Road, Home, and Farm Safety Day (Nappanee)

Amish life presents certain hazards that typical non-Amish life does not. Those can include dangers when traveling by buggy, working on the farm, or even dangers from non-electric fuels in the home. Adding a lot of children to the mix, as is the norm for Amish families, adds another layer to the topic. Of course, Amish parents teach their children the do’s and don’ts for everyday safety.

But it goes beyond that in a number of Amish places – where the local community takes the initiative to teach safe practices on a wider scale. One example is Mt. Hope, Ohio’s Amish Health and Safety Days, held annually to educate about safety in a community where you’re more likely to encounter an Amish person than an English one.

Another example of that just happened in Nappanee, Indiana, as reported in the Goshen News. “Amish Family Safety Day” was held with the cooperation of local safety institutions such as police, sheriff, and fire departments. The event chairman had this to say, summarizing the event:

“We’ve been doing this for approximately 10 or 11 years now, and we do it to promote safety in the community,” Neal Miller, chairman of the committee that organizes the event, said.

“It’s just an outreach thing that we try to do to get the community involved to make them more safe on the roads, in their homes and on their farms.”

A “few hundred members” of the community came out to the event. Here’s a sample of what it covered:

In addition to farm safety demonstrations, which included a skid loader, a tractor and a bushhog, the fire department performed a mock vehicle extraction, the DNR offered a boating safety program and a mock search and rescue operation was staged, which included the use of a drone provided by the police department.

And since this was an Amish event, you know there was food as well – including hamburgers, noodles, and brats – provided on a donation basis.

Donated money was used to cover costs of the event – but, showing the wide impact of the gathering, it is also distributed to Amish schools for CPR training for the school teachers.

Vendors also presented such items as carbon monoxide detectors, smoke alarms, and personal protective equipment (PPE).

Sometimes the Amish, or certain groups, are criticized for not using adequate buggy lighting, for instance. It can lead to an impression that “the Amish” don’t care about safety.

But events like this one are a testament to the fact that Amish people and communities certainly do care about safety. Their participation shows that many want to be proactive in addressing hazards they or their children might encounter in their daily lives.