Today marks a year since the Nickel Mines School shooting. Ten girls were shot. Five perished. Five lived on. A community was rocked by an unthinkable loss. The world watched and learned a rare lesson in forgiveness and grace. ‘The happening’ is the name local Amish attached to the event, and The Happening is author Harvey Yoder’s attempt to reconstruct, order, and make sense of…
I dropped in on Safety Days today, held at the Mount Hope Auction yards. Most of the hundreds in attendance were Amish. People slowly filed by educational booths promoting early learning, fire safety, and eye care. One fireman admonished listeners to ‘label their liquids’ since children could not tell the difference between potables and more lethal liquids such as kero or diesel. Besides the useful…
Male teachers are a rarity in the Amish school. Primarily an occupation for young unmarried women, one father, ‘Robert’, estimated that there were only about a half-dozen male teachers in the Holmes County vicinity, out of approximately 170 one-room schools. A quick count in the 2005 church directory actually turned up closer to 20, but with many schools having more than one teacher, males still…
Unlike the majority of Lancaster Amish, those in Holmes County may use bikes. These two little guys are taking advantage of a crisp September evening. Could this be the best time of year to be alive? It sure feels that way.
‘A hog farmer and a teacher!!’ Hog farms are few and far between in Lancaster dairyland, and hog farmers who deal with Amish ‘ninth-graders’ on a regular basis even fewer. Perhaps that’s why ‘Ephraim’ nearly shouted at me in glee when describing his odd occupational mix. He’s been handling vocational school duties for his area for twenty years now. You can tell he enjoys it….
A pretty inane observation (from a bleary head following another wearying but fruitful 80+ hour week): Amish toddlers seem to have an unusual attraction to leg hair. At least a couple times a week, as I stand there in my shorts showing some books to dad in the barnyard, the less-shy two year old will come up and take a grab or two at the…
If you knock on a random door in any of a number of Amish communities across the country, there’s a decent chance the home might contain a set of books called the Family Bible Library. Originally published in 1971, it is a perennial hit among the Amish, who appreciate the vivid illustrations, easy-to-understand text, and solid scriptural reference. For that matter many Amish have Bible…
I had a chance to catch up with a couple more friends the Thursday before last–‘Martin’, a minister of the New Order Amish persuasion, his wife, ‘Annie’, and their neat kids. My timing was perfect–suppertime! A grinning Martin plunked me down in front of a ‘haystack’–a potato-lettuce-chili-cheese- crumbled nachos concoction Annie had just prepared. Yum. (Yeah, I definitely had seconds). As we dug into our…
Day Two in Holmes County was a great one. I had a chance to catch up with a lot of Amish friends and acquaintances. I sat for an hour and a half having a nice chat with one friend, ‘Johnnie’, who just had his fifth child (all girls!). He gave me a bottle of homemade blackberry wine to take away. He, like many Amish, appreciates…
photo: Randall Persing Amish women let their hair grow from birth. If you ever catch an Amish female with her hair down, the sheer length of it can be surprising. In fact, with locks often reaching well past waist-length, the typical Amish head-covering seems to somehow bend the laws of physics. Where is their room for it all up there? A quick diversion: A follicle…