The Amish Population

Amish community in States originally comes from Germany at the early XVIII century. 

Only a small community arrived in and settled around the country, mostly in Lancaster, Ohio and Utha. They were prosecuted and burned alive by the anabaptist Chuch in their land, so only a couple of families made their way out and arrived here around 1730s. Later on some other families came by 1860s and joined to the Amish Counties. The total population at that stage isn't recorded, but when asking Amish members they can tell they were only a few.  

As for they believes, they stay together and only marry their own kind, so for all this generations they managed to grow their community up to 250.000 people overall USA. The biggest community can be found here in Lancaster, PA, where their community expanded to 38.000 members at the moment. 

It doesn't seem that many of them, but they are actually growing at fast speed and double the population every 20 years, as in every house its an average of 9 kids given birth. Other families may have 15 kids at home or even more.

Can you imagine having so many children?

For this entry we would like to share with you a picture featuring a complete Amish family, so you can have a dimension of it, however due to their believes there are not many Amish willing to be portrated, so we found this clothes hunging outside an Amish house which surely can help you image how busy it can be!

We found this a very shocking due to our way of living, but this is actually very smart thing to do when you run a farm or a garden for your living. For more details on how they make their living please checkthe entry How they make their leaving

Hope this reading was interesting, as we said before, if you have any questions, please shout them our way!

Best,

Paloma, Antonio & Estef

Technology vs Believes

Amish understanding of life comes from the New Testament, that´s what they stady at school, preach in church services or sing at home. They don't refuse technology as a whole, but only those developments that goes against their believes. Their possition towards technology, electricity or communication for instance, it is very different from ours, but if you take the time to investigate their reasons, it actually makes sense.

So we went to ask them why is there such a difference and here are some of the responses:

Us: Why is that you don't have electricity at home? How do you do without light?

Amish: We refuse to be connected to other houses permanently. To our believes, if we keep connected to those who sin, the sin would be share and you become a sinner too. However, we do have light at home, it might be not be the same, but we use battery lamps, propane engines for the washing machine or the fridge, or even disel engines to milk our cows, water our gardens, etc. 

Us: And what about the telephone? Are you allowed to use it? 

Amish: We use telephones to communicate between us, the only requirement is that the phone cannot be placed at home, for the same reason we don't have electricity. It's all about the wire world connection, so we normally place a phone box outside our hauses, which is still on our land, but not linked to the house. 

Us: And what about a mobile phone?

Amish: Well, there is a discussion going on within the community about the mobile allowance. It is trully wireless, however it also brings along all sort of connections. That's a tricky one, but Amish member do refuse to have it.

Us: Can Amish members drive a car?

Amish: Bapticed members cannot use other transports than feet traction. To us it is meaningful to always keep feets on the ground and if its not litelary ours, it has to be horse feet. We can only use other transports in case of vital need, as when we migrate from old Germany to USA.

Amish members normally move by buggy riding or what they call scooters, see iur experience with their transport for reference.

Those few questions made us open our eyes to the the Amish relation to tecnology, as we said before, they follow their believes, while try to make their life easy. Technology can be considered a tool as far as it doesn't generate a conflic with any religion aspect.

How they make their living?

It might seem that the Amish community lives isolated and produce their onw goods for living and that can be true for the more conservative churches, but not for all of them.

As the Tourist guides explained us, the Amish are involved in the market more that we might think at first.

There are 3 things they are well considered for and actually make money of: farming, growing gardens and building furniture.

They are consider the best farmers as they took special care of their animals and respect the nature behind this at the same time they evolve to a certain level where some techniques are being mechanized for a proper process of those goods. For instance, they may have up to 30 caws in a farm, they milk the caws twice a day, 5.30 am and 5.30 pm, with a diesel powered engine which helps them get the job done in about an hour while pasteurizing the milk for future selling to big companies who do the marketing. As farmers they get paid twice a month and that gives them more than enough to maintain the farm running, animals in shape and money for the family to live fully.

Amish are also known as good gardeners, in every local market is easy to find a vegetable Amish shop, that is where locals get their best products and a good deal. An Amish kid is expected to help at home since very stages, by the age of 13, after they finish school they may as well help on the vegetable shop at the market. An interesting thing for us was to discover that even Amish are not allowed to smoke, they also grow tobacco in large fields they then sell to big brands such as Phillip Morris, who the produce and sell to the big market.
They might be conservatives, but surely smart people!

Furniture building is also very important for their living. Amish build pretty much everything they need so they learn how to do it very young an due to the small population they end up having so many goods they won't consume. Some of the families have a furniture store where you can see all kinds of wooden work displayed at the front door. They are expensive though, so they make a lot of money out of that as well.

Apart from this 3 thing, they also find their way of living by sewing, cooking, making soup, buggy riding and all other random crafts they then sell to all tourist coming over to meet them.

That gave us an idea of how productive Amish people are, they are on the market, even though they like to be self-sufficient within their own community and they still know how to make money. Stay tunned for details on how they spend their money, which products and brands they consume and why.

Questions or comments are welcome!

Best,

Paloma, Antonio & Estef

Arriving at Lancaster Caunty

Hi all,

I bet you wonder how did we make our way to the Amish country. Well, there are some interesting bits on our way to Lancaster Caunty.

The story starts with the 3 of us comming from different places, so we were supposed to meet up at JFK International Airport, NY, on July the 1st. Antonio arrived safely on June the 29th and planned a nice 2 days around the city in the meantime. Although Paloma and Estefania were flying from Miami International Airport to JFK on July the 1st. All of a sudden our plans were changed by a flight cancellation, it seems like it was a weather condition in NYC, so the air space was closed and no planes could make its way there.

After so many hours at MIA airport Paloma and Estefania managed to get a new flight arriving at JFK the day after by noon. Now, the 3 of us rent a car our Delorian, for the time travel project. We wanted to get a Hyundai or Kia but no options, so we end up getting a 4x4 Jeep instead, pretty american style.

For all this time we spent on our way, we pretty much run out of battery, so mobile GPS wasn't an option by the time we arrived in Lancaster, 7 pm with no directions rather than: " We are looking for the Amish, could you please help us find the way?" At this point we stoped by a gas station with a very nice and interesting employee. His speaking was hard to understand with an Indian accent, but he really made the effort to help us: "At the light turn left till you see Rutary, take Rutary west..." We could not understand what Rutary meant untill we saw the signal I am sharing with you.


Even so, we managed to hit 30 RD and down to the countryside. Our next stop was at a small village, almost everything closed and no lights. We came across this 2 Amish girls, so we decided to ask them for some help in finding a place to stay. It was very shoocking seeing them walk to their car, but ever more when they reply: "Do you have internet? You can Google it."

Yes, that was a bit confusing for us, but we didn't gave up, so we kept driving and we arrived at the Amishview Hotel with a vacancy signal on it, checked in, dropp our staff and went to find a place to have dinner somewhere around. Funny enough we found out people at this area normally have dinner from 3-6pm and not many places to choose from. We got lost a couple of times running around a beautiful landscape with no lights on it, so we decided to go bed and start on better shape in the morning.

At the end we made it safely, but lots of fun on the way as you can imagine!
Stay tunned for what is to come :)
Antonio, Paloma and Estef

Welcome to our Creative Adventure

For those who don't know us, we are a team of 3 brilliant digital minds who decided to travel back in time to discover the roots of communication.

We are Paloma, Antonio and Estefania, and we work for a corean Advertising agency back at home called Innocean. The 3 of us applied for a Creative Adventure pitch run by our company, for witch we presented The Amish project and we actually won it! The main idea was to go where people still live with low media impact, so we found the Amish community in Lancaster would be the right place to be. If you want to know more about the project proposal, we recommend you go back to 1st and 2nd post in this blog, where you can find our 2 rounds of presentations.

Now this is where all begins, with this blog, we aim to share with our readers as many aspects of their daily basis as possible. So if you wonder what a real Amish life is like, stay tunned for next post to come.

Hope to see you around and please do share with us any questions that might come to your mind and we will try to find the answer for you.

Best

Paloma, Antonio & Estef

The Amish Project Final presetation

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Creative Adventure First presentation