My Amish Childhood Read online

  HARVEST HOUSE PUBLISHERS

  EUGENE, OREGON

  All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

  Cover photos © Neil Wright

  Cover by Garborg Design Works, Savage, Minnesota

  MY AMISH CHILDHOOD

  Copyright © 2013 by Jerry S. Eicher

  Published by Harvest House Publishers

  Eugene, Oregon 97402

  www.harvesthousepublishers.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Eicher, Jerry S.

  My Amish childhood / Jerry S. Eicher.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-7369-5006-0 (pbk.)

  ISBN 978-0-7369-5007-7 (eBook)

  1. Eicher, Jerry S.—Childhood and youth. 2. Eicher, Jerry S.—Religion. 3. Eicher, Jerry S.—Travel—Honduras. 4. Amish—Ontario—Biography. 5. Amish—Honduras—Biography. 6. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. I. Title.

  PS3605.I34A3 2013

  818'.603—dc23

  2012028996

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, digital, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Acknowledgments

  Two books were used to help me keep the dates straight. I owe a thank you to Monroe Hochstetler for his book Life and Times in Honduras and to Joseph Stoll for his book Sunshine and Shadow. Any errors in dates or events in My Amish Childhood are my own.

  The Two Amish Farms in Honduras

  The Country of Honduras with Points of Interest

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  The Two Amish Farms in Honduras

  The Country of Honduras with Points of Interest

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  About Jerry Eicher

  Chapter 1

  I can still see his face. Lean. Determined. Framed by his lengthy beard. I can see him running up the hill toward our house. He was carrying his bag of doctor implements.

  Mom was having chest spasms, and any real doctor was miles away—across four hours of the broken, rutted, dusty Honduran road we took only as a last resort.

  The running man was my Uncle Joe. The smart one of the family. The older brother. The intellectual genius. When Uncle Joe walked by, we stopped talking and listened intently when he spoke. On this day, he rushed by, not paying any attention to us children.

  I knew he was coming about Mom, but I recall experiencing no fear for her life. Perhaps I wasn’t old enough to have such a fear. To me, Uncle Joe’s haste seemed more entertainment than emergency. After all, Mom had looked fine to me a few minutes earlier.

  When Uncle Joe left the house some time later, he issued a favorable report that I never questioned. Nor did anyone else. The mysteries of the Englisha world of medicine were even further removed from us than the four hours to town. Uncle Joe studied the books, and we trusted him.

  Years later, when our little Amish community in Central America was on its last legs and held in the grip of terrible church fights over cape dresses, bicycles, singing in English or Spanish on Sunday mornings, and other horrors that the adults spoke of with bated breath, it was the look on Uncle Joe’s face as he talked with Mom and Dad by the fence on Sunday afternoon that made things clear to me. If Uncle Joe thought something was over, then it was over.

  Uncle Joe lived below us, across the fields, in a house smaller than ours even though his family was much larger. How they managed, I never thought to wonder. Their house never looked crowded. It was kept spotless by his wife, Laura, and their oldest daughters Rosanna and Naomi. We didn’t visit often on Sunday afternoons. Mostly we children dropped by on weekdays, sent on some errand by Mom or we wandered past on our meanderings around the countryside.

  They kept goats in the yard, all of them tied with long ropes to stakes. One of them was named Christopher. We didn’t have goats. Dad ran a machine shop, and Mom took care of the garden. Goats were foreign to us. Smelly creatures. Mom scorned goat’s milk, even when Uncle Joe said emphatically it was far superior to cow’s milk.

  We all lived near each other in those days—part of a grand experiment to see if the Amish faith could survive on foreign soil.

  My grandfather, Peter Stoll, an Amish man of impeccable standing, had taken it upon himself to lead an Amish community to the Central American country of Honduras. He wasn’t an ordained minister, and I don’t remember seeing him speak in public. Still, the integrity of his life and his ideas so affected those around him that they were willing to follow him where few had gone before.

  At the height of the experimental community, we ended up being twenty families or so. We all lived on two neighboring ranches purchased in a valley below a mountain. Most of us had come to Honduras from the hot religious fervor of the small Aylmer community along the shores of Lake Erie in Southern Ontario or from the detached coolness of Amish country spread over Northern Indiana. Plans were for the two to become one in mind and heart. And for awhile we did.

  Those were wonderful years. The memories of that time still bring an automatic gathering of hearts among the Amish who were there—and even some of us who are no longer Amish. All these years later, most of us are scattered across the United States and Canada—except for the few of the original group who stayed behind.

  Some of the people credit the joy of those days to the weather in our Honduras valley. And lovely weather it was. Balmy. Hardly ever above ninety or below forty. Others credit the culture. Some attribute our happiness to being so far from the States that we only had each other. I don’t know the full reason for our happiness. Perhaps it isn’t possible to know. But I do remember the energy of the place—its vibrancy. I do know the years left their imprints on us all.

  This was my childhood. Those hazy years when time drags. When nothing seems to come soon enough. And where everything is greeted as if it had never been before. To me that land—that valley—was home. I absorbed it completely. Its sounds. Its language. The color of the dusty towns. The unpaved streets. The pigs in the doorway of the huts. The open fires over a metal barrel top. The taste of greasy fried beans. The flour tortillas and meat smoked to perfection. In my heart there will always be a deep and abiding love for that country.

  Around us were mountains. To the north they rose in a gradual ridge, coming in from the left and the right to meet in the middle, where a distincti
ve hump rose into the air—officially named Mt. Misoco. But to us it was simply what the locals called it: La Montaña. The Mountain. Our mountain. Which it was in ways we could not explain.

  To the south lay the San Marcos Mountains. At least that’s what we called them. Those rugged, jagged peaks lying off in the distance. I never climbed those mountains, but I often roamed our mountain—or rather our side of it—from top to bottom. On its peak, looking over to the other side, you could see lines and lines of ridges running as far as the eye could see.

  A party of courageous Amish boys, along with a few visiting Amish youngsters from stateside, once decided to tackle the San Marcos Mountains. They threw their forces together and allowed two days for the trip. I was much too young to go along—and probably wouldn’t have anyway. But I waited for news of their adventure with interest. They came back soon enough—defeated and full of tales of dark jungles and multiple peaks that disoriented the heart. No one even caught sight of the highest point, let alone the other side.

  In the summer, around five in the morning, the Southern Cross—that symbol of Christianity—hung over the San Marcos Mountains. Its haunting figure made of stars swung low in the sky. I would stand for long minutes gazing at the sight, caught up in the glory of it.

  I was eight when we arrived in Honduras. We were one of the first families there after Grandfather Stoll had purchased and settled on the Sanson ranch. Dad seemed driven to the move by motives other than adventure. He was unhappy with the ordnung rules in the Amish community at Aylmer, and he wanted change. Change that didn’t include the great sin of joining a more liberal Amish church, of course.

  In time Dad came to love the land along with the rest of us. And strangely, he came to love what he didn’t expect—the old ways, imperfect though they had been. My most enduring memory of Dad in those days is hearing him sing the old German songs at the top of his voice over the roar of his machine shop motors. And in the end, it came down to that question for all of them. A choice between what they loved and what they loved the most.

  I grew up surrounded by men dedicated to an old faith. I saw those men, most of them my uncles, tested to the core. I saw them wrestle with the old and with the new, trying to figure out where everything fit together. I lived among giants of faith. I saw their agony and their sacrifice. I saw their choices, and it affected me deeply. Their faith had been hammered out back in the sixteenth century, in the old town of Zurich, Switzerland. Back during the time Ulrich Zwingli thundered his sermons in the old Grossmunster Church.

  But in the days of my childhood, those stories of long ago were not mine yet. Those gallant tales of deeds done under fire and sword. Of imprisonment in noblemen’s castles. Of narrow escapes into the Swiss countryside from the murderous Berne Anabaptist hunters. Instead, my memories are of men in my own time. Men who believed that life was not worth living if you didn’t believe in something worth dying for. I was surrounded by men of passion. And if someone should make the claim that these men were misguided, I would insist the fault lay not in caring too much about religious matters. For I learned while growing up among them that this is how a person should live. That true believers follow God with all of their hearts and souls.

  Chapter 2

  I was born in 1961 to a nineteen-year-old Amish woman. Her wedding in August of the prior year had been agreed to by her father only after a special arrangement was made. She would work at home the following summer to help with the family’s vast strawberry pickings. Because I arrived in May—nine months and a few days after the wedding—this didn’t happen. Grandfather Stoll was left to pick his strawberries without his married daughter’s help. And I’m now haunted by a characteristic that seems to follow me always. I disrupt the lives of those around me.

  Dad said he wanted a healthy wife. One who wasn’t always down with some ache or pain. I’m not sure how he ascertained that Mom did or didn’t fit these qualifications, but he got his wish for the most part. Even with her heart trouble later in life, I always remember Mom on her feet and fully in charge.

  Mom was a Stoll. Grandfather Stoll was a regal, jolly man with a fiery temper. He took on Amish bishops in his frequent complaints over the lack of missions and outreach. Somehow he survived those clashes. Often during his lengthy exchanges with church authorities, he would say too much. But once his temper had cooled, he’d get into his buggy and make return trips to apologize. And for awhile things would be smoothed over.

  In the end it was his actions and not his words that would change so many of our lives. Grandfather Stoll had married a Wagler—Anna Wagler. Her brother, the towering Amish intellectual David Wagler, along with several of Grandfather Stoll’s sons, founded Pathway Publishers, an Old Order Amish publishing house. They were all men who bore themselves with a confidence born deep in their souls. Intellectuals, most of them. If they doubted their faith, the world never found out. The Waglers came with a stable, steady constitution, while the Stolls often flirted with brashness.

  On the other side of my family, Grandfather Eicher was the opposite of the Stolls and Waglers. He was jolly and industrious. Few of his thirteen children showed any literary inclinations. Such things take a certain boldness of spirit, a willingness to work in the sunlight, and enough bravado to stare down critics. Grandfather Eicher ran underground like a mole. He had work to do. So while the Stolls and the Waglers wrote for Pathway and set forth on great ventures to change the world as they knew it, Grandfather Eicher ran the machinery at the print shop.

  From left to right: Susanna, Sarah, John, Miriam, and Junior.

  I’m the recipient of these dueling natures. Like Grandfather Eicher, I would rather stay out of sight and work with my hands. But then things stir in my spirit. Voices that must be obeyed. And up to the sunlight I go. It’s Mom’s fault really. She was the princess who married the stable help.

  After their wedding, Mom and Dad set up house in one wing of Grandfather Stoll’s home. The place was massive—a long, rambling house with high ceilings and huge rooms. My earliest memories begin there. I can see the house in the background while I’m wielding a stick and trying to chase a stray dog out of our yard. I don’t think he was very frightened by my feeble efforts.

  We moved after the birth of my brother John, the third child. All of us arrived in more or less yearly increments in those first years. My sister Susanna came second and was named after Stephen Foster’s song Oh Susanna, written in 1847. Somewhere Dad heard the song and fell in love with the line of the chorus: “Oh, Susanna, don’t you cry for me.” I doubt if Mom and Dad ever told anyone about this un-Amish source of Susanna’s well-known Amish name—at least not at the time.

  During those years, Dad had a prosperous construction business, primarily working in the town of Aylmer where he contracted residential housing. Things went so well, Dad built his growing family a white two-story home across from the South Amish schoolhouse. Our house had a nice porch on the front and a basement. Across the lawn, a new barn went up. I think Dad planned to raise pigs on the side because there wasn’t enough acreage for cows.

  My Aunt Magdalena, from the Eicher side of the family, taught school in the two years I attended there. I arrived eager to learn and experience this new phase of life. I loved the schoolhouse’s tall ceilings and the desks that were set in long rows. I loved the noise I could make with my shoes on the hardwood floors, the vast ceiling amplifying the sound. I remember a woodstove in the back and a shaggy woodshed outside. With our house just across the road, I didn’t pack a lunch like the other children did. I ran home at lunchtime for whatever Mom had ready for me.

  How I fared at my studies, I don’t remember. There are no report cards saved from those days. What I do remember is standing beside my desk during recess. My schoolbooks are open in front of me. I glance across the aisle where one of Uncle Stephen’s boys had his workbook open to the same place. His answer to one question was clearly different from mine. And since I knew him as someone whose answers were correct mo
st of the time, I eagerly grabbed my eraser and corrected my mistake.

  My cousin’s eyes widened in horror. He didn’t say anything as his mouth worked. When he had sufficiently collected himself, he rushed up front to report this clearly horrible offense to teacher Magdalena. I stood frozen at my seat, trembling inside as I awaited the approach of doom, which I knew would be followed by the gloating of my Stoll cousin. Indeed, he looked as if he had just cleansed the temple and was glad to have had a hand in the matter.

  Magdalena looked things over, asked a few questions, and led me outside by the hand. I fully expected to be strapped on the spot. Instead, she asked me if I could explain why I’d changed my answer. I told her some version of what I just recounted.

  “Don’t do that again,” she told me. And that was the end of it.

  I was thunderstruck. I silently followed her back inside the schoolhouse, unable to believe this turn of events. I can’t recall how my Stoll cousin took the verdict—I was too happy to care. But I never pulled that particular stunt again.

  After school I was free to roam around the house or in the barn. I can’t remember having any chores assigned to me, mostly because we didn’t have any livestock beyond our horses. There was no hay in the mow, the empty expanse vast where sparrows chirped and nested.

  As dusk fell, we would wait for Dad to come home from work. In the summertime he drove a cart with a toolbox attached underneath. Once the weather grew cold, he switched to his enclosed buggy.

  The road we lived on was spotted with Amish homes all along the stretch. The first place west was the huge, two-story house dubbed the “Red Mansion.” Why, I don’t know, except it was made of red brick. It certainly wasn’t for luxury reasons and it wasn’t a third the size of Grandfather Stoll’s place. It was inhabited at that time by Uncle Joe’s family, with Uncle Stephen’s family living in the next place on the right.

  In those early years I saw my first set of Tinker Toys in front of the Red Mansion. They were in a round box leaning against the mailbox post. Some Stoll child had been given it as a gift, I was told. That day I wanted a box of Tinker Toys more than I’d ever wanted anything. Why I didn’t say so, I have no idea. It simply seemed an unobtainable dream. Mom and Dad weren’t poor by any sense of the word, and looking back now, I suspect they would have willingly purchased a set for us children.