My purpose is to tell you about the Amish people, first because their society is quite a strange and disturbing one in our contemporary society, secondly because I met some of them and my meeting them left a strong impression on me. Therefore these lines won't be either a historical presentation or a sociological one, but the memory of a meeting and of a peculiar atmosphere.
Whoever saw Witness, the movie by Peter Weir with Harrson Ford and Kelly Mac Gillis, and had never heard abouth the Amish before, must have been astonished that anybody lives as they do in the twentieth century. Indeed who are the Amish people? They are the descendants of Dutch people who fled Holland and Germany and reached America. The center of the Amush country is located in Pennsylvania, near Gettysburg and about one hundred miles west of Philadelphia. The Amish refuse the advantages of modern life and try to maintain the way of life of their ancestors. For example they refuse electricity, and all its related devices such as the telephone, radio, television. They don't have automobiles and circulate in small black carriages pulled by horses. They wear pants, dresses and bonnets from the last century. To attach their clothes, they use pins instead of buttons. Mostly their activities center around agriculture. They live in a closed world surrounded by the biggest consumer society on earth. It is a wonder that they can resist the temptation of this modern society.
I have had the opportunity to visit the Amish country twice. Once as an ordinary tourist and the other time in a deeper way.
The first time I went there, I was travelling with my family. We were not disappointed, we saw everything we had expected to observe: bearded and solemn men in pants and braces driving carriages, refusing to be photographed, cute farms with their tall white ball-headed silos, without an electric pylon along the way, little bare-footed boys playing in the fields. Indeed it was a picturesque scene. Yet, I had the strong impression that we were being offered a nice bit of entertainment in the american style (like the rebuilt villages of the frontier inhabited by actors), created to make us tourists spend our money on the varied Amish-made handicrafts. In the meantime, I felt we were violating some people's intimacy. We were there as though looking at an Indian tribe from the Amazon, thus destroying their way of life. Despite the Amish's refusal of photographs, tourists could not help taking pictures. The Amish seemed to be hunted by photographers. They drove their carriages with their hands on their foreheads. The environment was polluted by all kinds of craft shops too. Of course it must have helped the Amish to live, offering them outlets for their products, however it was ruining the quietness and peace of their environment. Being looked upon as wild and strange animals surely will not help you lead your community life, or your spiritual life. That, I felt, was happening to the Amish living there and I feared they were losing their identity.
Although I had this basic impression that the Amish were condemned to die out like some other communities before them - for example the Quakers who disappeared out of new members because they forbid mariage and any sexual relationship and because the number of orphans became smaller - a visit to an Amish family made me focus on problems, but also realize how strong a community they were too.
I used to have an American penfriend whose father is a doctor and who lives in Pennsylvania. When I visited her fifteen years ago, her father suggested that I go with him to visit an Amish family. I was surprised because they lived in the North West of Pennsylvania, far away from the Lancaster county where I had been before. Anyway I did not hesitate. I learnt that a lot of Amish families had moved to that part of Pennsylvania to find peace and because the price of the land was not so high.
So we drove to this family. Mr. C., my penfriend's father, explained how he came to know this family. He had treated one of the daughters. It was indeed a sad story. The girl had a great pain in the stomach and he could not determine its cause. She stayed in the hospital quite a while, being examined, having a scanner, etc. Eventually he discovered that she had a psychosomatic illness. The Amish children go to Amish schools during the obligatory period of scholarship, up from then they return to their parents' farm, the boys helping with farming, the girls helping at the house. This particular girl was so fond of school, and she felt miserable at the idea of returning home to be a housewife. Therefore Mr C. tried to convince the parents to send her to a university run by Mennonites, a community that resembles the Amish, but is a little more modern and they refused.
To get there, we lefts the main road, lined by traditional houses, billboards and fastfoods, to enter a dirt road. It was another world, hidden behind the paved road was a network of dirt roads where Amish farms were established. We arrived at the family's farm. It was a small one, they owned only a few cows and two horses. The number of children seemed extremely high to me : there were 15 sisters and brothers! We were very warmly welcomed, the parents wanted to thank the doctor. I tasted some of their recipes, they were nice and very German.They spoke German to each other. Everybody was dressed as I have described before. We went for a ride in their carriage. It was very odd, poetic and bucolic, as though this very strange music from the "Witness" movie was accompanying us. Still as the sadness of the girl revealed, everything was not idyllic.
That time though, I understood more how valuable their life could be. In spite of the temptations of modern life, their way of life remained because they were a highly spiritual community. Everybody paid for the expensive hospital bills. They build each other's houses: each time an Amish family needs a new home, everybody meets to build it. The community provides security and a certain human comfort that is sometimes lacking in our society. That surely must be hard to leave.
