My Amish Experience Trip or Everything You Want To Know About Pennsylvania Dutch Community in the United States

Connecting Amish People

• Amish people do not use anything electrically powered. Each Amish house has a huge tank of propane gas for heating up water and for refrigerators to function, as well as heating up the houses in the wintertime. They use rechargeable batteries for home lamps. 

• The biggest fear is that their kids start watching TV and it will take them away from their religious beliefs and life values.

• They use phones only for business purposes and emergencies. Phones are not allowed to be kept in the house. So they build a separate booth for the landline phones and place it far away from their house to decrease the temptation of calling a friend out of boredom or need to gossip. 

• The Amish find out about the news within their community from a weekly newspaper called Die Botschaft. Its name is in German but all the articles are in English. Amish people can read about all the news related to the Old Order Amish and Mennonite Communities from the paper since 1975. 

Worship and Religion 

• They think of all the people as Amish and non-Amish which they call English. It doesn’t matter what your origin is. If you do not belong to the Amish, you are referred to as English.

• Amish people do not have churches. All their religious masses are held at their homes. All because back in the times when they were persecuted for their religious beliefs in Europe they had to worship secretly at their homes. 

• They must attend one mass per two weeks. The bishop designates the family who will host a mass and assigns foods to other community members to bring to the table. They all eat together after 3 and a half hour mass in Old-German ( PA Dutch is miss pronounced PA Deutsch ( “German”). 

Clothing rules

• Amish people have strict rules about clothing choices. Women are only allowed to wear dresses in solid colors, no patterns are allowed since they are considered “too worldly” and inappropriate. Young girls and boys are dressed up like adults: wearing small copies of dresses, pants ( with no pockets), and hat wear. Men’s pants used to not have pockets so that they couldn’t flaunt their riches. Nowadays, they have pockets but in the hidden places in the clothes. 

• All shoes are divided into black church shoes for Sunday masses, weddings and funerals and more casual shoes for all other occasions. However, women and kids prefer to be barefoot. Men usually wear shoes since they work with machinery. Women must wear hats when praying. Since they should pray all day they cover their heads all day. 

• A traditional Amish wedding dress looks modest. It is made up of a solid color dress and a white apron. Most Amish brides from Lancaster choose navy blue for their wedding dress as they consider it to be a lucky color. After the wedding a white apron is carefully stored in the closet. The next time it is out will be the funeral day as according to the Amish tradition, women are buried in their wedding aprons. 

Lifestyle 

• All work in the Amish families is divided into women’s and men’s. Women cook, do laundry ( 6 days a week), grow gardens and maintain households. Men do farming, carpentry, machinery work. 

There is a popular joke about it.

—What will you never find in an Amish garden?

—The weeds and men.

• Bicycles are not allowed to be used. Bishops of the church believe that they go too fast and can easily take an Amish person away from the community. 

• The first sign of how to spot an Amish house is to look for the laundry drying on strings outside. Green blinders are also customary for the houses owned by PA Dutch families.

Schooling 

• Amish people give their kids basic education. They go to school from 1st to 8th grade to learn English, German, arithmetics, spelling. All the subjects that are necessary for living. 

• Education for the sake of education or attending college is considered a waste of time. 

• They don’t learn to play musical instruments. All grades are taught together by one teacher. Teacher earns around $70 a day.

• Among school rules you can find some bizarre ones, for example:

“Stay off the toilet roofs” or “A pupil shall not openly correct the teacher of any mistakes at any time”. 

• Kids love playing baseball, hockey and volleyball. 

Rumspringa or Moment of Truth 

• Amish people practice baptism in adulthood. Kids follow Amish traditions due to respect for their parents. When they turn 16, teenagers are allowed to try things they have never been able to do before, go and see the world outside their community. This period is called Rumspringa. Amish youth are no longer under the total control of their parents on weekends and, because they are not baptized, they are not yet under the authority of the church. “Worldly” activities include buying a car, wearing non-Amish clothes, going to the movies. 

• After this experience finishes, a teenager must choose whether to get baptized and join the Amish church or leave the community. If they decide to leave the Amish lifestyle, they should go away from their family but are allowed to visit from time to time. If they decide to go on and get baptized to then get married to another Amish person, this decision is non-reversible. In case they get baptized but decide to leave the Amish community, they will be shunted. 
• According to the statistics in Lancaster county, PA about 92% of Amish teenagers decide to get baptized and stay within their church. 8% decide to live their lives outside of the community they were raised in.

Beliefs and Traditions 

• When someone passes away there are established mourning rituals and grieving periods of time. If an Amish loses a husband/a wife or a child, mourning lasts for a year, if their uncle or aunt passed away it goes on for 6 months, more distant relatives are grieved by their surviving family members for one to three months. During that time women wear black dresses. 

• According to the Amish religion, there should be no pictures or paintings in their houses. In order to still be able to decorate their walls, women put calendars in every room justifying it by the necessity of knowing what day it is. The trick is that every wall calendar has photos or pictures attached to it. This is considered a round-about to the general rules.

• Another interesting thing I learned was the curtain rules. Amish people are not allowed to hang curtains on their windows but there is an exclusion to the rule when it comes to the teenagers entering Rumspringa phase. Teenage girls are allowed to decorate their rooms with curtains and read romance novels at that time. 

Financial and Medical Security 

• The American government allows Amish people not to pay social security taxes if they are self-employed or working for another Amish person. The Amish don’t trust the government and rarely vote in the elections, unless these are local elections that can possibly affect their lives. 

• They usually pay their medical expenses by cash. If an Amish person needs an expensive medical procedure done, it will be covered by the bishop who holds all the funds of the Amish community in a savings account in the bank. So instead of a medical insurance number, Amish patients are asked the name of their bishop and trust him to cover all the expenses. 

• The Amish believe that everyone should be financially equal. A few years ago one Amish farmer made a huge profit from one of the crops of high demand and gave half a million dollars he earned to the common church fund. 

Financial and Medical Security 

• The American government allows Amish people not to pay social security taxes if they are self-employed or working for another Amish person. The Amish don’t trust the government and rarely vote in the elections, unless these are local elections that can possibly affect their lives. 

• They usually pay their medical expenses by cash. If an Amish person needs an expensive medical procedure done, it will be covered by the bishop who holds all the funds of the Amish community in a savings account in the bank. So instead of a medical insurance number, Amish patients are asked the name of their bishop and trust him to cover all the expenses. 

• The Amish believe that everyone should be financially equal. A few years ago one Amish farmer made a huge profit from one of the crops of high demand and gave half a million dollars he earned to the common church fund. 

The Amish way of life is best described in one of their popular proverbs, going as follows: “He who has no money is poor; he who has nothing but money is even poorer.”