Amish Country: Living in a Dream Land

Have you ever heard a Germany community live in US with no electricity?

Yap! They are Amish. They live in a group which settled in several states in the US. If I were asked to describe how they live, simplicity will be my best answer. They refuse to go along with modernization and choose to preserve their culture and religious beliefs in a unique way. Why unique?

They refuse to use modern devices in daily life

Yup, they don’t use TV, computer which of course including internet. No phone. They don’t even drive cars or any “modern” vehicle. Interestingly, some of them consider riding a car, plane, or such as acceptable to travel in distance as long as they are just the passengers. Well, that depends on how strict or conservative someone is. Another thing to pointed out is that they use some modern tools to make their handy-craft when it is not possible to do it manually. However, it is for business purpose only and the electricity generated by themselves. Yes, they have their own generator. You’ll see no wire coming in or out from their houses.

So, how do they travel in daily life?

They have what outsiders call buggie, but the Amish call it as a carriage. Buggie is a horse-powered cart like what we usually see on the old-age-setting Western movies. They also use Scooters and Bicycle as their main transportation.

Traditional cloths

Amish wear their traditional costums in everyday life. For women, they have plain European dresses, a kind of apron which they put on when they work in the kitchen or field, and a white hat. They do their hair in a certain way: pulled the hair to the back (I don’t know how to describe it in a clear way :3). Meanwhile for the men, they also have an identic hair-cut. For the cloths, they wear plain shirt and strat-pants (long pants). Those who are married are required to have beard, thus you can tell who are unmarried yet.

Ah! And we could not take any pictures of them to respect their belief. Thus, I cannot provide you any photos with Amish. If you curious, just search on google, I believe you will find some because there was also a movie taken place in Amish country. Who knows? :D

Make their own tasty food

Amish’ foods are the best one in the US so far. It suits Asian’s taste too. Hihihii. We had dinner with one Amish family today which consists of father-mother and 6 daughters. Unfortunately, we only could meet the mom and her one daughter because the other family members went to market in New Jersey to sell their farm and domestic industry products. Back to dinner, they served us with many delicious cookings. First, bread with strawberry, peanut (the best one), and apple jam also with pickles. Then came the main course: the tasty chicken, meat ball (beef), soft-mash potatos with delicious sauce, and peas. After that, we had chocolate pie and another taste (I cant spell the name) pie. Oo it’s not over yet, we had vanilla ice cream as the dessert. They all are amazing. I wonder how they do the mash potato and peanut jam with no blender. Hehehe. Those two skillful lady also sang for us and you know what? I concluded that they are such a tallented people who choose to live in their own way. They can cook, sing, and do hardwork. It’s not only valid in this family but also other Amish families. Isn’t that awesome?

I wonder if they have a cooking course or build a restaurant. Must there be thousands people who love it! Hahaha.

Do inter-marriage among their members

Amish only marry within their own group and they are not allowed to get divorced. They can only marry from the last week of October till the last week of March. The age for marriage differ between man (22-23 yo) and woman(19-20 yo). Usually, Amish family consists of 6 to 9 children. Because of this inter-marriage, our tour guide (Jane) confirmed what Stacy had told us that Amish had a kind of genetic disease (related to tummy, no further info I got).

Posses their own society system

Amish society has their own chief that is their bishop. All matters including law, education, religion, politics are set within their own group. I asked what happened if they have a dispute on a certain matter among members, do they solve it according to state’s law of Amish’ law?

Jane said usually they will solve it internally according to their own law except for serious crime such as murder. There were no such case ever heard before, she added. However, there was this one case when one-mentally-ill guy came to an Amish school, took out of his gun, and crazily killed 5 children. Horrible!

Amish children enjoy education until 8 grade in Amish local school. 1 teacher teach basic science and knowledge to around 25 kids. They know what’s going on outside by reading newspapers. That’s answer my question why Daniel (our Amish-young-man guide) knew about baseball while he never watched TV. When they reach 16 yo, Amish teenagers entering what they call Rom-spring (dont know the spelling) meaning they have freeddom to hang around with friend of their age. They can do dating, picnic, go to theater, etc just like any other kid. In a certain time, a young Amish will have a chance to explore the world outside which different from where they grew in. They basically can do anything for a year before choosing whether to stay as Amish or become an outsider. In the old days, if you decided to become an outsider, then no Amish is allowed to speak to you, including your parents. You can still come back home when christmast, but they will serve you in the different table and leave you in silence. However, today it’s becoming less strict yet I’m not sure to which extend it has changed. We need to bear in mind that Amish are a collective community which posses a strong relationship among family members and neighbours.

Another interesting thing is that they consider all non-Amish as English. No exception. Thus, even I’m Indonesian, they will consider me as English.

From economic perspective, most of them do farming. They have hectares of land. They do chicken and other animal husbandry, they make their own cloths, foods, basically everything that they need. So from I see, they are self-sufficient people. Some of their crafts, creative and domestic industry products, and also foods become the commodity to sell them outside the community. They pay taxes as any other Americans, yet they don’t pay for social security tax.

In order to understand Amish community, let’s put it in the history context. According to Jane, it was dated back to the Christianity Reform led by Martin Luther King, there was one denomination called Manonite. Manonite created because they didn’t agree with Luther King. However, a person named Jacob Amen still consider Manonite as too progresif toward changes, thus he created this Amish Community and they then moved to America in seeking for a safer place. Eventhough Amish is a strong Catholic’ community but interestingly they don’t have any church. They pray twice a week in the week-end (usually) at one’s home for 2 hours. They take turn. Why they don’t have church?

This is back to the old days before they moved to US, there were persecutions in churches in Swiss. Oh ya, Amish themselves are Swiss-Germany (If I’m not mistaken), people often misconcept them as Ducth.

I think that was all I can tell about Amish Country. I love this place a lot. It was like my dream land. I always imagine an ideal place as their living place, exactly like that but of course with the technology in it. Hehehe. If I were rich enough, I’d love to buy land around Amish Country. O I forget to tell you that they are not live in a totally separate area from the “common people” as I though before, they are pretty well integrated with them. They only keep their way of life. And when I asked Jane whether it’s OK if one of them wants to move outside the town where the Amish community is not there, She said if the Amish want to move, they will move as a group.

Another story before we went to Amish Country, we visited the Islamic Center here and welcomed by Rizwan, the President of the organization. All people who work there are volunteers and all the money they use for daily operation and to build their place are coming from donations. They have one private school (not big, I think only until 4rd grade) where everyone can enrolled in, unnecessarily to be a moslem.

I see that mosques that we have been visited in the US serve different purpose as those in Indonesia. Here, the mosque also become a center of learning and basically center of any Islamic activities hold by Moslems.