Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy Read Free

spent that day responding to a flood of phone calls from reporters eager for information. Now we were headed to the scene of the tragedy, to answer more questions from the journalists gathered there.
     
    We continued climbing “the ridge,” as the Amish call it, a low east-west range that slices the Lancaster Amish settlement in half. The older section of the settlement, on the north side, was formed about 1760, when Amish moved near what would later become the village of Intercourse. In 1940, Amish pioneers pushed south of the ridge toward Georgetown in search of cheaper land. With the Old Order population doubling every twenty years, Georgetown soon became the hub of a thriving community. Today some eight hundred Amish families live within a four-mile radius of the small town. The “southern end,” as this section of the settlement is called, is hillier and also on the “slower, more conservative side,” according to the Amish who live in the older area to the north.
     
    The flashing lights on the back of the buggy we were trailing reminded us that the Amish do not shun all technology. Although they spurn television, the Internet, car ownership, and other things they fear could harm their community, the Amish selectively use some innovations and adapt others in ways that help rather than hinder their way of life. Their struggle to tame technology—through the ingenuity of Amish “engineers”—has resulted in a fascinating blend of old and new: LED lights on buggies, steel wheels on modern tractors, cash registers run by batteries, shop saws powered by compressed air, and telephones kept in shanties outside of homes so they don’t disrupt family life. Some Amish businesses use the newly developed Classic Word Processor. Advertised as “nothing fancy, just a word horse for your business,” this electronic device has an eight-inch screen, a Windows operating system, and standard spreadsheet and word processing software. Unlike most computers, however, this “Old Order computer” has no connections for phone, Internet, or video games.
     
    Even though we had spoken with reporters about the West Nickel Mines School for hours the day before, we were not sure of its location. We knew it was a dozen miles southeast of Lancaster City, tucked away from Route 30, the busy tourist strip overflowing with restaurants and outlet stores. We also knew that the old nickel mines had folded in 1890 when the business fell prey to cheaper imported metals. Now the area was simply a rural region, mostly farms, small businesses, and bungalows scattered along curving country roads.
     
    As we topped the ridge and approached Mine Road, a stop sign appeared in the gray dawn. Police cars blocked Mine Road to the right. An officer with a large flashlight came to our window and asked where we were headed. After seeing our identification, he waved us to the right and told us to park behind the TV trucks that lined Mine Road for as far as we could see.
     
    Mine Road is a narrow, backcountry road with a few scattered houses on the left side and farmland overlooking a small valley on the right. The West Nickel Mines Amish School lay near the bottom of the valley. Dozens of media trucks were parked along the berm of the road, their satellite dishes pointing skyward. A white board fence enclosed the schoolyard, the school building, two outhouses, and a ball field. Horses grazed in the pasture adjacent to the school, the site of another ball field. The one-room, nineteenth-century-style school with its rooftop bell made a lovely backdrop for the morning news. A peaceful and idyllic view, it could have been the vestibule of Paradise. In fact, a small village by that name lies just five miles over the ridge to the north.
     
    We parked and walked down the road through a throng of television crews and journalists. Some of the reporters, disheveled and yawning, had apparently spent the night in their trucks. Several New York journalists, probably