123. Amish

Wednesday, 24 April 2019

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, USA

Who remembers the 1985 film, ‘Witness’? (I know, 1985!).

Starring Harrison Ford as a policeman in the Amish community in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

You do? Good.

Well a visit to the Amish community is worth a trip. Yet another fascinating insight. As you enter the region, you see small carriages being pulled by a horse, men working is the fields with their horses pulling farm machinery.

Along with the Mennonites, the Amish originate from Switzerland, and still speak German in Pennsylvania today.

Inside an Amish house is very basic. No wallpaper, just plain painted walls in mute colours. They don’t use mains electricity as it’s a connection to the outside world so everything is converted to battery power, or they use propane converted fridges, freezers, lights, heating and the like.

Their dress is plain and basic too. The women wear loose fitting dresses which are black or grey with a low key coloured undershirt and a white prayer bonnet. The men wear trousers with plain buttons, no zips and no belt but held up with braces. Shirts are plain white with basic buttons. Church is every other Sunday and the other Sundays are for meeting friends and family in prayer and singing.

They are free to leave the ‘church’ at any time until they are baptised and this does not cause any problems or friction within the community.

But.

Once you are baptised into the ‘church’ and then you leave. Whoa. That’s a no no. And you will be given the cold shoulder.

In death, they have a 3 day wake then you are buried in the cemetery with a simple gravestone which is the same as everyone else’s. No flowers as that means you’re special and in the Amish community you are all the same.

The Amish children go to an Amish school for 8 years where you’re given a basic education of reading, riting, rifmatic (I’m ejukated two).

Amish men grow a beard when they get married but no moustache and the married women don’t wear rings.

There’s no computers, iPhones, internet, TV in their lives. Some will have a telephone but this will be in a small kiosk on the edge of the property. So if someone rings you, they have to wait a good few minutes whilst you walk to the kiosk.

Some are embracing solar power and see a number of farmhouses with solar panels on the roof. The farmhouses are quite large and in good condition. They use horses to pull the equipment and get around places by using a horse and small black carriage. But it is OK to accept a lift in car if someone else is driving. They don’t ride bicycles as that means they could go too far from home but instead ride scooters (as in push along with your leg, rather than a motor scooter).

Most of the shops around have places to tie up the horse and carriage, just for the Amish.

The Amish tend to dry their washing out on a clothes line rather than tumble dry and every farm you pass has washing hanging out (it being a nice sunny day).

Stop and speak with a few Amish as I drive by. They’re really friendly. One young lad tells me that his horse was about US$2,000 plus US$6-8,000 for his carriage. An old fellow, with a long whispery, grey beard, tells me that his son now runs the farm and they’re planting corn and raising a dairy herd. A young woman tending her garden tells me that they socialise with non-Amish people and go out and hear about the world from them. Another man is ploughing a small field with his horses and says it will take about 8hrs to do. Hard work me thinks.

To the Amish, anyone that is not Amish is simply referred to as ‘English’.

Which will no doubt upset the French.

It’s a very simple, pleasant and chilled out life they lead.

And perhaps one we could take note of in our hectic, computer crazed world we live in.